Law School Discussion

Law Students => Current Law Students => Topic started by: record on February 27, 2006, 11:30:47 PM

A New Zealand author is embroiled in a plagiarism row over Dan Brown's blockbuster hit, the religious thriller The Da Vinci Code, and has launched legal action against the novel's publishers. Nelson-born Michael Baigent and American writing partner Richard Leigh are suing Random House Group in Britain, claiming damages that could run to millions of dollars. The Da Vinci Code joined the New York Times bestseller list at No 1 and has sold more than 12 million copies internationally. Before the lucrative Christmas sales week it had sold about 100,000 here and remains at No 1 on the local bestseller list. It has reportedly earned Brown £140 million ($380 million) and is about to be turned into a Hollywood movie starring Tom Hanks.

But Baigent and Leigh, whose own 1982 work Holy Blood, Holy Grail caused such religious outrage when it was published that it sparked death threats, say Brown has lifted large tracts of their research without permission. Their lawsuit claims at least £150,000 damages for breach of copyright, saying a "substantial" amount of their work has been used and asking that copies of The Da Vinci Code be destroyed. Baigent told the Weekend Herald the United Kingdom lawsuit meant he could not talk about the case, or which parts of The Da Vinci Code he and Leigh say amount to plagiarism.

"All I can tell you is that we are suing Dan Brown for theft of intellectual property. "The matter's with the High Court, it's sub judice, and I can't say anything more than that unfortunately. "It's never a nice thing for one writer to have to be suing another." Random House spokeswoman Clare Harrington said from London that the publishers would file their defence with the court soon.

"We continue to be confident that the claimants' case is wholly without merit," she said. Details of the allegations made by Baigent and Leigh remain sealed by the British court. However there are clear links between Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code, even though the latter is a novel and the former a non-fiction study of secret religious history. It also appears the identities of Baigent and his two co-authors have provided Brown with material for his characters.

Sir Leigh Teabing is a central character in The Da Vinci Code, but that name combines Richard Leigh's surname and an anagram of Baigent, and Sir Leigh's physical description is said to be similar to The Holy Blood's third co-author, Henry Lincoln. Brown's hero is American professor of religious symbology Robert Langdon. Baigent has completed a masters degree that included a dissertation on Renaissance symbolism.

Holy Blood, Holy Grail has also sold millions of copies, and aroused controversy through its exploration of a theory that Jesus might not have died on the cross but lived, married and had children. Their research explored whether a secret bloodline existed, and potentially challenged central foundations of Christianity - including the role of women. It featured societies such as the Knights Templar and Priory of Sion, which are also core to mysteries within The Da Vinci Code. Anger at Holy Blood, Holy Grail prompted death and bomb threats against the authors and publishers, and Baigent still keeps his address in England a secret.

He was reluctant to outline why he was taking legal action, but has told the Daily Telegraph newspaper in Britain that being "lumped in" with Brown's novel degraded the historical implications of their research. "It makes our work far easier to dismiss as a farrago of nonsense. "What a lot of people have forgotten was that the Holy Blood was a hypothesis," Baigent told the Weekend Herald this week. "We had a lot of data that we were deeply suspicious of, and we spent a lot of time checking it. "We managed to establish that a certain amount was shown to be correct; the rest was plausible." Baigent, 56, has lived in the UK since 1976 but still visits home and family here most years.

I think it's just a ploy for the author of the 1982 book: Holy Blood, Holy Grail to get some free advertising. If it weren't for this suit, would anyone have ever heard of this book in the first place?

I don't see how any of you can determine whether or not the suit has merit without knowing all the facts first...

Simply saying that you think Dan Brown is such a good author that he wouldn't need to plaigerize is a pretty bad defense in my opinion...

That's like saying that you know Barry Bonds doesn't take steroids because he is such a good baseball player that he doesn't need steroids...

And for all you know, whatever work of his that impressed you could have been plaigerized just the same...

Its crap cause the ideas Brown uses in his book, he readily admits that they aren't his but other theological theories from others. So this other dude is saying he is the one who made up the Holy Grail theory? TOTAL CRAP.

So this other dude is saying he is the one who made up the Holy Grail theory? TOTAL CRAP.[/quote]

If that were the case, the the lawsuit would be total crap. However, the palintiffs are not suing based on a claim that they created this theory that Jesus humped Mary what's-her-name and that the bloodline survives.

Rather, they are alleging that Brown's book copies not only the basic themes of their book, but that it also copies their book's architecture and basic narritive structure.

And I'm not saying that Brown plaigerized or that he will be found guily. I'm just clarifying your erroneous claims and oversimplification of the matter.

yeah, dan brown won his case but his book still reads so 'familiar' to me. i believe that he did lift some ideas and a few paragraphs are very suspect. isn't it possible that with so many people having a vested interest in this case that the judge was swayed to rule in his favor?

if two songs were so similar, i wonder if the ruling would have been the same. it really troubles me that the judge's decision was over 70 pages. that's overkill to me. i can't wait until i take a course in copyrites.

The Da Vinci Code is a mystery/detective novel by American author Dan Brown, published in 2003 by Doubleday.

The novel is based on the controversial premise that there is a conspiracy within the Roman Catholic Church to cover up the true story of Jesus. According to this premise, the Vatican knows it is living a lie, but continues to do so to keep itself in power.

The novel has helped generate popular interest in speculation concerning the Holy Grail legend and the role of Mary Magdalene in the history of Christianity. Fans have lauded the book as a creative, action-packed and thought-provoking work. Critics, whilst often praising the quality of the storytelling, have described the book as being inaccurate on a number of points, both large and small, and claim that most of the information on the "Fact" page at the front of the book is in fact completely untrue and creates confusion between speculation and fact. From a religious point of view, many critics, citing Dan Brown's own comments in various media interviews, claim that the book is a deliberate attempt to undermine Christianity in favour of a feminist/pagan agenda, and decry the many negative implications about the Roman Catholic Church and Opus Dei.

This book concerns the attempts of Robert Langdon, Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard University, to solve the murder of renowned curator Jacques Saunière (see Bérenger Saunière) of the Louvre Museum in Paris. The title of the novel refers, among other things, to the fact that Saunière's body is found in the Denon Wing of the Louvre naked and posed like Leonardo da Vinci's famous drawing, the Vitruvian Man, with a cryptic message written beside his body and a Pentagram drawn on his stomach in his own blood. The interpretation of hidden messages inside Leonardo's famous works, (which relate to the concept of the Sacred feminine) including the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, figure prominently in the solution to the mystery.

The main conflict in the novel revolves around the solution to two mysteries:

- What secret was Saunière protecting that led to his murder? - Who is the mastermind behind his murder and the murder of the three other sénéchaux?

The novel has several concurrent storylines that follow different characters throughout different parts of the book (DVC chapter summaries). Eventually all the storylines and characters are brought together and resolved in its denouement.

The unraveling of the mystery requires the solution to a series of brain-teasers, including anagrams and number puzzles. The solution itself is found to be intimately connected with the possible location of the Holy Grail and to a mysterious society called the Priory of Sion, as well as to the Knights Templar. The story also involves the Catholic organization Opus Dei.

The novel is the second book of a trilogy by Brown in which Robert Langdon is the main character. The previous book, Angels and Demons, took place in Rome and concerned the Illuminati. Although Angels and Demons is centered on the same character it is not necessary to read the book in order to understand the plot of The Da Vinci Code. The next book is tentatively scheduled for release in 2007. Its working title is The Solomon Key, and it is understood to concern Freemasonry.

The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 feature film based on the bestselling 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, by author Dan Brown. It was one of the most anticipated films of 2006, and was previewed at the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival on May 17, 2006. The Da Vinci Code then entered major release in many other countries on May 18, 2006 with its first showing in the United States on May 19, 2006.

Because of some controversial interpretations of Christian history, both the book and movie version of The Da Vinci Code have been the target of criticism by the Roman Catholic Church. Some bishops have even urged members to boycott the film. Many of the early showings were accompanied by protesters outside the movie theaters, and early critical reviews were decidedly mixed. However, in its opening weekend, the film earned over $224 million worldwide, second only to the opening of 2005's Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. It is the second highest grossing movie of 2006 worldwide -- grossing an impressive $754,380,142 U.S. as of October 14,2006.

From a religious point of view, many critics, citing Dan Brown's own comments in various media interviews, claim that the book is a deliberate attempt to undermine Christianity in favour of a feminist/pagan agenda, and decry the many negative implications about the Roman Catholic Church and Opus Dei.

As early as August 1912, Jung had intimated a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-tones archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth psychology. This takes us to the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia. Pistis Sophia is an important Gnostic text. The five remaining copies, which scholars date c. 250­-300 AD, relate the Gnostic teachings of the transfigured Jesus to the assembled disciples (including his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Martha), when the risen Christ had accomplished 11 years speaking with his disciples. In it the complex structures and hierarchies of heaven familiar in Gnostic teachings are revealed. The female divinity of gnosticism is Sophia, a being with many aspects and names. She is sometimes identified with the Holy Ghost itself but, according to her various capacities, is also the Universal Mother, the Mother of the Living or Resplendent Mother, the Power on High, She-of-the-left-hand (as opposed to Christ, understood as her husband and he of the Right Hand), as the Luxurious One, the Womb, the Virgin, the Wife of the Male, the Revealer of Perfect Mysteries, the Saint Columba of the Spirit, the Heavenly Mother, the Wandering One, or Elena (that is, Selene, the Moon). She was envisaged as the Psyche of the world and the female aspect of Logos.

The title Pistis Sophia is obscure, and is sometimes translated Faith wisdom or Wisdom in faith or Faith in wisdom. A more accurate translation taking into account its gnostic context, is the faith of Sophia, as Sophia to the gnostics was a divine syzygy of Christ, rather than simply a word meaning wisdom. In an earlier, simpler version of a Sophia, in the Berlin Codex and also found in a papyrus at Nag Hammadi, the transfigured Christ explains Pistis in a rather obscure manner:

Quote

Again, his disciples said: Tell us clearly how they came down from the invisibilities, from the immortal to the world that dies? The perfect Saviour said, "Son of Man consented with Sophia, his consort, and revealed a great androgynous light. Its male name is designated 'Saviour, begetter of all things'. Its female name is designated 'All-begettress Sophia'. Some call her 'Pistis'."

The best-known of the 5 manuscripts of Pistis Sophia is bound with another Gnostic text titled on the binding "Piste Sophiea Cotice". This "Askew Codex" was purchased by the British Museum in 1795 from a Dr. Anthony Askew. Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, the Askew Codex was 1 of 3 codices that contained almost all of the gnostic writings that had survived the suppression of such literature both in East and West, the other 2 codices being the Bruce Codex and the Berlin Codex. Aside from these sources, everything written about Gnosticism before World War II is based on quotes, references and inferences in the Patristic writings of the enemies of Gnosticism, a less-than-neutral source, where Gnostic beliefs were selected to present their absurdities, bizarre and unethical behavior, and heresy from the orthodox Pauline Christian standpoint. The text proclaims that Jesus remained on earth after the resurrection for 11 years, and was able in this time to teach his disciples up to the first (i.e. beginner) level of the mystery. It starts with an allegory paralleling the death and resurrection of Jesus, and describing the descent and ascent of the soul. After that it proceeds to describe important figures within the gnostic cosmology, and then finally lists 32 carnal desires to overcome before salvation is possible, overcoming all 32 constituting salvation. Pistis Sophia includes quotes from five of the Odes of Solomon, found in chapters between 58 and 71. Pistis Sophia was the only known source for the actual wording of any of the Odes until the discovery of a nearly-complete Syriac text of the Odes in 1909. Because the first part of this text is missing, Pistis Sophia is still the only source for Ode 1.

It is clear that Jung was seeing and defining what we call the Return of (to) the Feminine Energies or higher frequency of thought consciousness. Jung also channeled feminine archetypes including Salome.

There has recently been a tremendous amount of excitement around the symmetry and geometry that is contained in DaVinci's drawing called "Proportions of the Human Figure." The popular novel, "The DaVinci Code" by Dan Brown tells of how there is a six-pointed star hidden within the drawing. One idea around the six-pointed star is that the 2 intersecting triangles represent a symmetrical union of male (yang) and female (yin). This is particularly interesting since the greater human condition seems to be out of balance, with a preponderance of yang, or masculine energy.

So the idea of a coming together in balance and harmony would be fantastic. There is a lot of information that suggests that the world is about to enter into a new feminine era. There are ideas of a major shift for mankind elucidated in many traditions. Hindu tradition speaks of a transition from a previous age to the age of Kali. Kali represents the feminine destroyer. Kali also represents the vindication of truth over lies. The Mayan calendar is coming up on its completion. The Mayans also believed in a shift for mankind. In many ways we sit on a precipice where lies and manipulation by governments, religion and the media literally control our lives. We have world leaders who are engaged in wars and the slaughter of 100's of thousands of innocents. It is tempting to believe that a secret and sacred geometry lies within our own physical bodies. Even so, I have always been somewhat skeptical about secret codes. There have been a number of attempts to uncover a perfect symmetry within DaVinci's work. I have seen some constructions within the drawing that have been made by others, towards the end of espousing certain conclusions. For example, some think that the star represents something called the Merkaba. The Merkaba is a star tetrahedron which represents the human energy field (or light body). This is just one example. I wanted to see how they did it... how they came to their conclusions. So I worked on it myself, using information about the drawing that I had researched. I discovered that some of the conclusions that others made seemed to be somewhat arbitrary. I could not understand how they got from A to B, and they seemed to ignore subtle clues in DaVinci's drawing.

So what is the DaVinci code? What is the hidden information within the sketch? The real starting point with DaVinci's "Proportions of the Human Figure" is in the work of an ancient by the name of Vitruvius who was an architect. Vitruvius developed the concept of 'squaring the circle' which basically involves constructing a square with an equal surface area to a circle or visa-versa. DaVinci was fascinated by the ideas that Vitruvius had about squaring the circle. DaVinci's drawing contains both a square and a circle with unequal surface areas. There are clues within the drawing that can be used to 'square the circle' and 'circle the square'. This is the starting point. This construction, which can be accomplished without any measuring device, is called the Vitruvian Man. I did exactly that myself, and discovered some remarkable symmetries in DaVinci's drawing. In fact, I constructed the geometry with only a protractor and a straight edge. But upon completion I wanted to check the surface areas of the circles and the squares to discover if Vitruvius was correct. First have a look at the drawing that I did, along with notes in the margin about the utterly fantastic symmetries it contains.

Click on the image below to launch a slideshow explaining the concepts here. Once in the slideshow, you can hover over the right side of the image and click to navigate to the next image.(http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/7919/davincicode01pn1.jpg)

Now, while I was able to make the above drawing with only a protractor and a straight edge; I still wanted to check to see if Vitruvius was correct in his squaring the circle thing. Following are the measurements I took off the original drawing that I did. (the image above is slightly reduced in size however)

Drawing MeasurementsDaVinci Circle Radius is 3.33" (the largest circle)DaVinci Square Side is 5.51"Blue Circle Radius is 3.105" (supposed to be the same area as DaVinci's square)Black Square Side is 5.90" (supposed to be the same area as DaVinci's circle)

Following are the calculations that I made from my measurements:DaVinci Circle Surface Area is 3.33 x = 34.84Black Square Surface Area is 5.90 x 5.90 = 34.81

The surface area of the square that I constructed is nearly the same as DaVinci's circle (only off by 3/100's of a square inch!). And the surface area of the circle that I constructed was very nearly the same as DaVinci's square. How cool is that! Now on to the next bit. I had some time ago seen another representation of proportions of the Earth and Moon in this drawing. But again, the work was arbitrary as if the author was trying to prove a point, rather than to let the geometry reveal itself. Personally, I had a suspicion that the earth/moon proportion indeed was in the drawing. If you look at the distance from the top of the head to the arc of the blue circle (this was the Vitruvius construction) and use that distance as a radius, you can draw a circle around the head. Another circle can then be constructed that is the exact height of the man, with the center being exactly at the groin. (Notice the faint line DaVinci has at the groin … this is one of the clues.) Again, I wanted to check to see if the small red circle and the large red circle were in the same proportion as the moon and the Earth. Following are the measurements of those two circles.

Finally, I wanted to mention the astrological event of November 9, 2003 called the Harmonic Concordance. There was an amazing synchronicity for me, because I was working on writing this article during the week just prior to November 9th. The Harmonic Concordance as I understand it, is a very symmetrical pattern called the Grand Sextile which forms a 'Star of David' in the pattern of the Sun, Moon and planets. This is a very rare occurrence, and what makes it even stranger is that it was accompanied by a full Lunar eclipse. I am not an astrologer, so I can't really interpret what this all means, but I was able to obtain an astrological chart, because I wanted to check for the 'Star of David', as I had heard that it was in there. So we've got a full Lunar eclipse and a very rare astrological aspect that coincide on November 9, 2003. Here is the chart:

(http://img237.imageshack.us/img237/7795/davincicodechartbt6.jpg)

The symmetry and synchronicity of this is amazing. "As above, so below" takes on real meaning when you think of the Star of David revealed by DaVinci and in the sky on November 9th. The drawing contains much, much more hidden information. Notice some of the other clues (more faint lines at the elbows; at the shoulders).

The theory publicized in 1997 in the pseudohistorical book The Templar Revelation by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, that the person to the left of Jesus (to his right) is actually Mary Magdalene, rather than the apostle John (as most art historians identify the figure). This theory was central to Dan Brown's popular 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code. In the novel, it is said that John/Mary Magdalene has a womanly bosom, feminine facial features, and is swaying gracefully toward Peter. Peter appears to be making a threatening gesture across John/Mary's throat. The author uses this theory to advance his view that Leonardo da Vinci was once the head of a secret society, the Priory of Sion, which protects the secret of Jesus' royal bloodline, and the location of his modern descendants.

The fact is, however, that while damage makes it impossible to be sure of the figure's gender, it appears to be wearing male clothing. Although Mary could have been wearing male clothes, it is not highly probable. There are only 13 figures in the painting, so if one is Mary Magdalene, an apostle is missing: somebody would have noted a missing male apostle earlier. Some have suggested that on the front of the figure of Simon Peter there is one hand with a dagger which is associated to nobody in the picture, but in clearer reproductions this is seen to be Peter's right hand, resting against his hip with the palm turned outward; the knife points towards Bartholomew (far left) who was to be executed by being flayed. It may also indicate Peter's impulsive nature, as he cuts off a soldier's ear in John 18:10. A detailed preliminary drawing of the arm exists. Other paintings from that period (Castagno's 1447 and Ghirlandaio's 1480) also show John to be a very boyish or feminine looking figure with long fair hair. This was because John was supposed to have been the youngest and most unquestioningly devoted of the apostles. Hence he is often shown asleep against Jesus's shoulder. It was common in the period to show neophytes as very young or even feminine figures, as a way of showing their inferior position. This tradition continued well after the period, as the 19th century sculpture in Drogheda Cathedral, Ireland demonstrates. Not to mention that Leonardo also portrayed a male saint with similar effeminate features in his painting St. John the Baptist.

There is a lot of information that suggests that the world is about to enter into a new feminine era. There are ideas of a major shift for mankind elucidated in many traditions. Hindu tradition speaks of a transition from a previous age to the age of Kali. Kali represents the feminine destroyer. Kali also represents the vindication of truth over lies. The Mayan calendar is coming up on its completion. The Mayans also believed in a shift for mankind. In many ways we sit on a precipice where lies and manipulation by governments, religion and the media literally control our lives.

Is it not that these arguments make people in actuality adhere even more to the masculine principle, despite appearing to do just the opposite?

(http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/2677/htlastsupper3080408mnvz5.jpg)Alfred Hrdlicka's etching of an orgy at the Last Supper has provoked strong criticism in Austria

Not that I'd not pay attention to the subject of the thread (copyright issues are way too important to overlook after all) but your usename caught my attention -- does it mean Angiotensin Converting Enzyme Inhibitors, per chance? I became curious as I've come across the acronym when I was reading the label of a drug my grandpa uses, I believe it's called enalapril or smth like that.. anyway, I remember it very well, cuz my grandpa was given the drug even though it was absolutely contraindicated in patients with renal artery stenosis like him. He ended up in emergency room because of the deterioration in renal function that developed because of the ACEI therapy initiated (we did not press charges against the doctor treating him, his hospital settled in advance).

[...] anyway, I remember it very well, cuz my grandpa was given the drug even though it was absolutely contraindicated [...]

Absolutely.. hmmm, it's true it's counterindicated, though... for instance, if you'd ask any cardiologist before 1990s about β-blockers being used in heart failure, they'd tell you they're counterindicated as they have the potential to worsen the condition. Yet, studies in the late 1990s showed their positive effects on morbidity and mortality in congestive heart failure patients. It may seem counterintuitive to administer drugs with negative inotropic activity to a patient with HF, but several clinical studies have clearly demonstrated improved systolic functioning and reverse remodeling in patients receiving β-blockers. These benefits arise in spite of occasional initial exacerbation of symptoms. The benefit of β-blockers is attributed, in part, to their ability to prevent the changes that occur because of the chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system, including decreasing the heart rate and inhibiting the release of the renin.

Two β-blockers have been approved for use in HF: Carvedilol and long-acting Metoprolol. The first is a non-selective β-adrenoreceptor antagonist that also blocks α-adrenoreceptors, whereas the second is a β1-selective antagonist. β-Blockade is recommended for all patients with heart disease except those who are at high risk but have no symptoms or those who are in the acute phase of HF.

Absolutely.. hmmm, it's true it's counterindicated, though... for instance, if you'd ask any cardiologist before 1990s about β-blockers being used in heart failure, they'd tell you they're counterindicated as they have the potential to worsen the condition. Yet, studies in the late 1990s showed their positive effects on morbidity and mortality in congestive heart failure patients. It may seem counterintuitive to administer drugs with negative inotropic activity to a patient with HF, but several clinical studies have clearly demonstrated improved systolic functioning and reverse remodeling in patients receiving β-blockers. These benefits arise in spite of occasional initial exacerbation of symptoms. The benefit of β-blockers is attributed, in part, to their ability to prevent the changes that occur because of the chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system, including decreasing the heart rate and inhibiting the release of the renin.

Sorry! The precise mechanism by which β-adrenoceptor blockers exert their beneficial actions in patients with heart failure remains unclear. Several possibilities have been proposed, including heart rate reduction, β2-adrenoceptor–mediated modulation of catecholamine release, antagonism of the receptor-mediated toxic actions of norepinephrine on the myocardium, and favorable effects on myocardial energetics. Although carvedilol treatment was associated with a significant improvement in left ventricular ejection fraction and left ventricular stroke work, this effect was unrelated to changes in total systemic or cardiac norepinephrine spillover. The rise in left ventricular stroke work is accompanied by a modest rise in myocardial oxygen consumption per beat, although contractile efficiency was unchanged. The favorable effects of carvedilol on ventricular function in the failing heart are not explained by alterations in norepinephrine release or by changes in myocardial contractile efficiency.

Sorry! The precise mechanism by which β-adrenoceptor blockers exert their beneficial actions in patients with heart failure remains unclear. Several possibilities have been proposed, including heart rate reduction, β2-adrenoceptor–mediated modulation of catecholamine release, antagonism of the receptor-mediated toxic actions of norepinephrine on the myocardium, and favorable effects on myocardial energetics. Although carvedilol treatment was associated with a significant improvement in left ventricular ejection fraction and left ventricular stroke work, this effect was unrelated to changes in total systemic or cardiac norepinephrine spillover. The rise in left ventricular stroke work is accompanied by a modest rise in myocardial oxygen consumption per beat, although contractile efficiency was unchanged. The favorable effects of carvedilol on ventricular function in the failing heart are not explained by alterations in norepinephrine release or by changes in myocardial contractile efficiency.

To date, it has been proposed that the superior cardiac protection provided by carvedilol is not a consequence of hemodynamic variances but rather is due to its additional antioxidant effects. Studies in animals suggest that antioxidant effects may be protective in myocardial ischemia and may help retard the progression of atherosclerosis. Carvedilol decreases nitric oxide, the chemical that causes endothelial dysfunction and apoptosis (programmed cell death). In addition, carvedilol decreases the expression of structural extracellular proteins, an effect that reverses cardiac remodeling.

To date, it has been proposed that the superior cardiac protection provided by carvedilol is not a consequence of hemodynamic variances but rather is due to its additional antioxidant effects. Studies in animals suggest that antioxidant effects may be protective in myocardial ischemia and may help retard the progression of atherosclerosis. Carvedilol decreases nitric oxide, the chemical that causes endothelial dysfunction and apoptosis (programmed cell death). In addition, carvedilol decreases the expression of structural extracellular proteins, an effect that reverses cardiac remodeling.

fortified, winbow has already mentioned what you say, albeit tangentially.. now, maybe she's saying too many things (perhaps to make sure she's being all things to all people as it is the case when you can be nothing to everyone :) but she does mention the "remodeling" thing you explain in a little bit of more detail...

To date, it has been proposed that the superior cardiac protection provided by carvedilol is not a consequence of hemodynamic variances but rather is due to its additional antioxidant effects. Studies in animals suggest that antioxidant effects may be protective in myocardial ischemia and may help retard the progression of atherosclerosis. Carvedilol decreases nitric oxide, the chemical that causes endothelial dysfunction and apoptosis (programmed cell death). In addition, carvedilol decreases the expression of structural extracellular proteins, an effect that reverses cardiac remodeling.

To date, it has been proposed that the superior cardiac protection provided by carvedilol is not a consequence of hemodynamic variances but rather is due to its additional antioxidant effects. Studies in animals suggest that antioxidant effects may be protective in myocardial ischemia and may help retard the progression of atherosclerosis. Carvedilol decreases nitric oxide, the chemical that causes endothelial dysfunction and apoptosis (programmed cell death). In addition, carvedilol decreases the expression of structural extracellular proteins, an effect that reverses cardiac remodeling.

Is there some kind of cohort or case-control study confirming this?

Well, gent, it is true that cohort and case-control methodologies are the main tools for analytical epidemiological research. This is not to say, though, that findings from both cohort and case-control studies always reflect true associations which can be universally generalized. Epidemiological research is, to a large extent, of an observational character as opposed to experimental research. One should not forget that observational epidemiological studies are subject to the influence of factors over which the investigators most often do not have full control, and that findings from these studies are less reliable than those of studies with an experimental research design. It is therefore imperative that findings from analytical epidemiological studies are critically scrutinized before any judgement of causality is made. Furthermore, findings from one single epidemiological study only exceptionally provide conclusive evidence of a causal relationship between exposure and disease.

Experimental research provides data from which firmer conclusions can be made as compared with epidemiological studies. In experimental research, investigators can manipulate one factor while controlling others, and the main research question can be broken down into subquestions with comparatively simple causal assumptions. Through repeated manipulation of one or more factors in a series of experiments concerned with subquestions, the main research question can be resolved. The experimental approach allows control of the effect of extraneous factors that may have an effect on the outcome under study, but are not under investigation. Such extraneous factors may, if not under control, distort the results of the research and lead to false conclusions about cause and effect. In biomedical research on human beings the randomized clinical trial is the closest option to experimental research methodology. Observational epidemiological research has the disadvantage that extraneous factors cannot be manipulated by the investigators. Although information of such extraneous factors is collected and quantitatively adjusted for when they are known to be present, findings from observational epidemiological studies are generally less conclusive than those from experimental studies because of the less strict control of extraneous factors.

Bradford Hill has listed nine aspects concerned with the association between exposure and disease which need to be considered. The first of these is the strength of the association. A strongly elevated relative risk is more likely to reflect a causal association than is a slightly or moderately increased risk. Consistency of findings across studies conducted with different methodologies and in different settings, is another aspect. A third characteristic is specificity, that the exposure causes a particular disease, e.g. the observation that cigarette smoking is associated with squamous cell carcinoma of the respiratory tract. An important condition is the Sequence of events: the potentially causative factor must precede the effect, which in this context is disease. The dose-response relationship, or biological gradient, is another aspect. For example, massive exposure to sunlight is more likely to cause melanoma in susceptible individuals than is little or moderate sunlight. Biological plausibility is an aspect which is important, but depends on the biological knowledge of the day. The association should be consistent with what is generally known about the occurrence of the disease, its natural history and pathophysiology, and should not conflict with this knowledge. The causal interpretation of an association is furthered if there is experimental evidence in support of it, for example if elimination of exposure reduces the incidence of the disease. The ninth aspect is analogy. For example, if a virus is shown to be oncogenic in animal studies, we are more prone to accept that the human papilloma virus may be the cause of cervical cancer in humans. In his essay on association and causation, Bradford Hill notes that " none of my nine viewpoints can bring indisputable evidence for or against the cause-and-effect hypothesis and none can be required as a sine qua non ". The challenge of assessing causation is one of many fascinating aspects of epidemiological research.

Now as to the specific advantages and disadvantages of cohort and case-control studies you mention:

Cohort studies

Advantages

- Allow complete information on the subject’s exposure, including quality control of data, and experience thereafter. - Provide a clear temporal sequence of exposure and disease. - Give an opportunity to study multiple outcomes related to a specific exposure. - Permit calculation of incidence rates (absolute risk) as well as relative risk. - Methodology and results are easily understood by non-epidemiologists. - Enable the study of relatively rare exposures.

Disadvantages

- Not suited for the study of rare diseases because a large number of subjects is required. - Not suited when the time between exposure and disease manifestation is very long, although this can be overcome in historical cohort studies. - Exposure patterns, for example the composition of oral contraceptives, may change during the course of the study and make the results irrelevant. - Maintaining high rates of follow-up can be difficult. - Expensive to carry out because a large number of subjects is usually required. - Baseline data may be sparse because the large number of subjects does not allow for long interviews.

Case-control studies

Advantages

- Permit the study of rare diseases. - Permit the study of diseases with long latency between exposure and manifestation. - Can be launched and conducted over relatively short time periods. - Relatively inexpensive as compared to cohort studies. - Can study multiple potential causes of disease.

Disadvantages

- Information on exposure and past history is primarily based on interview and may be subject to recall bias. - Validation of information on exposure is difficult, or incomplete, or even impossible. - By definition, concerned with one disease only. - Cannot usually provide information on incidence rates of disease. - Generally incomplete control of extraneous variables. - Choice of appropriate control group may be difficult. - Methodology may be hard to comprehend for non-epidemiologists and correct interpretation of results may be difficult.

Bradford Hill has listed nine aspects concerned with the association between exposure and disease which need to be considered. The first of these is the strength of the association. A strongly elevated relative risk is more likely to reflect a causal association than is a slightly or moderately increased risk. Consistency of findings across studies conducted with different methodologies and in different settings, is another aspect. A third characteristic is specificity, that the exposure causes a particular disease, e.g. the observation that cigarette smoking is associated with squamous cell carcinoma of the respiratory tract. An important condition is the Sequence of events: the potentially causative factor must precede the effect, which in this context is disease. The dose-response relationship, or biological gradient, is another aspect. For example, massive exposure to sunlight is more likely to cause melanoma in susceptible individuals than is little or moderate sunlight. Biological plausibility is an aspect which is important, but depends on the biological knowledge of the day. The association should be consistent with what is generally known about the occurrence of the disease, its natural history and pathophysiology, and should not conflict with this knowledge. The causal interpretation of an association is furthered if there is experimental evidence in support of it, for example if elimination of exposure reduces the incidence of the disease. The ninth aspect is analogy. For example, if a virus is shown to be oncogenic in animal studies, we are more prone to accept that the human papilloma virus may be the cause of cervical cancer in humans. In his essay on association and causation, Bradford Hill notes that " none of my nine viewpoints can bring indisputable evidence for or against the cause-and-effect hypothesis and none can be required as a sine qua non ". The challenge of assessing causation is one of many fascinating aspects of epidemiological research.

Assuming you establish causality, how do you go for estimating much of the morbidity and mortality from a disease, for instance, might be prevented by interventions? Just curious, yanno :)

This should include a large nationally representative population (rather than a referred population). Ideally, the sample should be a naturalistic one and not a concatenation of groups known to be either normal or abnormal (because this generally eliminates gradations in functioning that characterize children to whom screening tests are applied (e.g., those with below average but not disabled performance).

Reliability

Information should be included on internal consistency, inter-rater reliability, and test-retest reliability. Stability (longer-term test-retest reliability) is sometimes included although given the rapid changes in developmental performance set against a small set of items, stability indicators are not likely to be strong or meaningful.

Validity

Includes concurrent validity (a comparison of screening measures to diagnostic measures). Ideally concurrent validation should involve a test battery that samples the same range of developmental tasks measured by the screening test (e.g., if motor, language and academic skills are measured, the diagnostic battery should include motor, language and academic tasks). Discriminant validity studies are also desirable because they show how well a screening test detects the specific kinds of problems. In the case of broad-band developmental screens, discriminant validity studies should illustrate the extent to which the more common disabling conditions such as language impairment, mental retardation, learning disabilities, autism and cerebral palsy are detected, and for mental health screens, how well internalizing and externalizing disorders are detected. Predictive validity studies are not common but are desirable because they reflect how well screening test items and overall screening test performance measure enduring and meaningful dimensions of child development.

This is the "acid test" of screening instrumentation and takes a unique form in screening test construction. Generally referred to as accuracy indices, criterion-related validity for screening tests include the following concepts:

In a random sample of children, if all were administered a diagnostic battery and categorized into the presence or absence of disabilities (e.g., by viewing eligibility for services under IDEA), some would be found to have disabilities. If screening tests were then given to the same group, ideally, all children with disabilities would score below cutoffs on the screen and thus be identified as needing referrals for diagnostic workups and special services. In reality, detection of disabilities is imperfect due to behavioral noncompliance, psychosocial malleability and age-related manifestations, and the brevity of screens. Thus, sensitivity, sometimes called co-positivity, is percentage of children with true problems correctly identified by a screening test (e.g., by failing, abnormal, or positive results). Ideally, 70% to 80% of those with difficulties should be identified. While this figure may seem low, many tests fail to attain this level of accuracy and none attain sensitivity that is substantially higher. More importantly, repeated screening is thought to improve detection rates over time.

Specificity

To continue the above example, most children in a random sample who are given diagnostic tests would be found to have normal development. Screening tests given to the same group would ideally identify all the children with typical development as normal (e.g., above cutoffs, passing or negative scores). Reality differs of course, and so specificity (or co-negativity) indicates the percentage of children without disabilities correctly identified, usually by passing or above cutoff scores on the screen. At least 70% to 80% of those with normal development should be correctly identified. Still, because there are many more children developing normally than not, specificity closer to 80% or higher is desirable.

Other Accuracy Indicators

Screening test research sometimes includes information on other accuracy indicators.

- Positive predictive value - Negative predictive value - Hit rate

Positive predictive value

Positive predictive value answers the question, to what extent does a suboptimal screening test score, reflect a true problem? If all children performing poorly on a screening test are pooled and administered diagnostic tests, at least a few will perform in the broad range of normal (because of the limits of specificity) and the rest will have disabilities. For example, if 9 out of 10 children with failing scores on screening tests are later found to have developmental diagnoses, the test’s positive predictive value is 9/10 or 90% meaning that for any screening test failure, there would be an 90% chance of a true developmental problem. In reality, positive predictive value is rarely 90% with values ranging from 30% to 50% being far more common (i.e., one of every two or three referrals will render a diagnosis. While this may seem troublingly inaccurate, the costs of over-referral (approximately $1000 for a comprehensive diagnostic evaluation) are substantially less than the cost of under-treatment, (a life-time loss to the child and society of more than $100,000 if needed early intervention is not offered).(Glascoe, Foster & Wolraich, 1997; Barnett & Escobar, 1990).

Over-referral

Also reassuring are results from a recent study showing that approximately 70% of children over-referred on developmental screening tests have numerous psychosocial risk factors and score on diagnostic measures of intelligence, language, and academic achievement, well below the 25th percentile (the point below which regular classroom instruction is less than optimally effective). Glascoe, 2001). This suggests that almost all children performing poorly on screening tests need at least some additional scrutiny and intervention and that a range of responses is desirable (e.g., Head Start, Title I, parent training, as well as special education and related services).

Negative predictive value

Negative predictive value is somewhat less commonly presented but involves determining the degree to which an optimal (above cutoff, passing or not-at-risk) score reflects typical or non-delayed development. For example, if 95 out of 100 children with passing scores on screening tests are later found on diagnostic testing to have typical development, the test’s negative predictive value is 95/100 or 95% meaning that for any passing score, there would be an 95% chance of a no developmental problem. Some measures also report over and under-referral rates. This reflects the proportion of the entire sample who should have been referred but were not correctly identified (under-referral rates) or should not have been referred (over-referral rates).

Hit rate

Hit rates are occasionally reported and are simply the total number of children for whom a screening test gave accurate information i.e.,co-positives and co-negatives are added together and then divided by the entire sample (co-positives + co-negatives+ false-positives + false negatives). Hit rates are an extremely misleading statistic and should not be used as an indicator of test accuracy. In the example shown in Figure 1, the hit rate is (70+16)/100 = 86%. Because there are far more co-negatives, specificity carries excessive weight in the computation of hit rates and as can be seen, the hit-rate is closer to the specificity index than to the sensitivity index. If in the above example, sensitivity were only 50% (10 children with disabilities correctly identified and 10 under-detected), the hit-rate would still remain deceptively attractive [(70+10)/100 = 80%] and mask serious flaws in accuracy.

Utility

Less of a psychometric construct and more a function of practical attributes, screens should be studied for their usefulness to diverse professionals in varied settings. Such studies often address length of administration and scoring, acceptability to parents and children, readability, amount of training required, cost of administration in terms of professional time to deliver the measure, score and interpret it, and descriptions of other amenities helpful to specific applications (e.g., ability to aggregate results for program evaluation, availability of growth indicators for use in plotting progress over time, etc.).

Prescreening

In an effort to conserve educational and health care dollars, it is obviously desirable to select measures with a high degree of positive predictive value. Given the subtlety and gradations of developmental outcomes, high positive predictive value remains elusive. Nevertheless, positive predictive value by administering a second screening test or by using part of a screen (e.g., a subtest) as a prescreen. Prescreening tests are extremely brief measures with a high degree of sensitivity but limited specificity. Prescreens are administered routinely and are followed by screening tests only when children fail the prescreen. Although prescreening can simply compound error and lead to under-referrals, accurate prescreening improves detection rates, and saves considerable time, since prescreens reduce, often by one-half to two-thirds, the numbers of children requiring complete screening.

Copyright issues have traditionally been not given the importance they deserve. That's have been the case even in the US, let alone in less developed countries. When I was in school in Russia I remember many professiors who'd translate books from English to Russian and publish it as if they had written it themselves, under their own name. We as students would not mind it had the books been translated correctly.. but these "professors" did not even know English good enough!

Believe it or not, in British law publishing someone else's original copy work and claiming you have made it (known as plagiarism and completely different from copyright infringement) is a criminal offence. For the most part, the criminal law is only used for commercial copyright infringement with one exception, and an offence is committed when knowing or reasonably suspecting that the files are illegal copies, and without the permission of the copyright owner, a person:

makes unauthorised copies e.g. burning music files or films on to CD-Rs or DVD-Rs;

distributes, sells or hires out unauthorised copies of CDs, VCDs and DVDs;

on a larger scale, distributes unauthorised copies as a commercial enterprise on the internet;

possesses unauthorised copies with a view to distributing, selling or hiring these to other people;

while not dealing commercially, distributes unauthorised copies of software packages, books, music, games, and films on such a scale as to have a measurable impact on the copyright owner's business;

publishing someone else's original copy work and claiming you have made it

certain copyrights allow Archival copies of software to be made however these are not to be distributed.

The penalties for these "copyright infringement" offences depend on the seriousness of the offences:

before a magistrates' Court, the penalties for distributing unauthorised files are a maximum fine of £5,000 and/or six months imprisonment;

in the Crown Court, the penalties for distributing unauthorised files are an unlimited fine and/or up to 10 years imprisonment.

Also note §24 Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 which creates a range of offences relating to the distribution of any device, product or component which is primarily designed, produced, or adapted for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of effective technological measures. When this is for non-commercial purposes, it requires there to be a measurable effect on the rights holder's business.

I was a medieval studies major (yikes I know) in UG, and I believe books like Dan Brown serve an important role in society. While this book was not mind-blowing it was entertaining and thought provoking. I also believe that this book probably caused more people to go and buy Holy Blood, Holy Grail. It is common knowledge that Dan Brown based his story around this idea. Does it make in unoriginal? Sure. But it was not meant to read as an academic, informative source. D. B's book's purpose was meant to entertain. I mean should the Jew's sue George Lucas for Raiders of the Lost Arc? (Not the best example by any means) I think it comes off as more of a tribute to them and their work. I mean no one (except dorks like me) would have known their book had even existed.

FYI- The "Christian idea" of the holy grail is usually attributed to Chretien de Troyes in his story Perceval. Before him the grail finds its beginning in Norse and Celtic oral traditions and it is from here that Chretien lifted this idea and Christianized a common pagan theme.

Rather, they are alleging that Brown's book copies not only the basic themes of their book, but that it also copies their book's architecture and basic narritive structure.

Their book is a non-fiction book. What themes would be taken from it? How would the narrative structure apply? They read very differently. This lawsuit was ridiculous. I hope they made enough money from boosted sales to cover court expenses.

Copyright issues have traditionally been not given the importance they deserve. That's have been the case even in the US, let alone in less developed countries. When I was in school in Russia I remember many professiors who'd translate books from English to Russian and publish it as if they had written it themselves, under their own name. We as students would not mind it had the books been translated correctly.. but these "professors" did not even know English good enough!

Believe it or not, in British law publishing someone else's original copy work and claiming you have made it (known as plagiarism and completely different from copyright infringement) is a criminal offence. For the most part, the criminal law is only used for commercial copyright infringement with one exception, and an offence is committed when knowing or reasonably suspecting that the files are illegal copies, and without the permission of the copyright owner, a person:

makes unauthorised copies e.g. burning music files or films on to CD-Rs or DVD-Rs;

distributes, sells or hires out unauthorised copies of CDs, VCDs and DVDs;

on a larger scale, distributes unauthorised copies as a commercial enterprise on the internet;

possesses unauthorised copies with a view to distributing, selling or hiring these to other people;

while not dealing commercially, distributes unauthorised copies of software packages, books, music, games, and films on such a scale as to have a measurable impact on the copyright owner's business;

publishing someone else's original copy work and claiming you have made it

certain copyrights allow Archival copies of software to be made however these are not to be distributed.

The penalties for these "copyright infringement" offences depend on the seriousness of the offences:

before a magistrates' Court, the penalties for distributing unauthorised files are a maximum fine of £5,000 and/or six months imprisonment;

in the Crown Court, the penalties for distributing unauthorised files are an unlimited fine and/or up to 10 years imprisonment.

Also note §24 Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 which creates a range of offences relating to the distribution of any device, product or component which is primarily designed, produced, or adapted for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of effective technological measures. When this is for non-commercial purposes, it requires there to be a measurable effect on the rights holder's business.

In the US the major problem appears to be self-plagiarism. It is the reuse of significant, identical, or nearly identical portions of one's own work without acknowledging that one is doing so or without citing the original work. Articles of this nature are often referred to as multiple publications. Typically, high public-interest texts are not a subject of self-plagiarism; however, the authors should not violate copyright where applicable. "Public-interest texts" include such material as social, professional, and cultural opinions usually published in newspapers and magazines. In academic fields, self-plagiarism is a problem when an author reuses portions of his or her own published and copyrighted work in subsequent publications, but without attributing the previous publication. Identifying self-plagiarism is often difficult because of legal issues regarding fair use. Some professional organizations like the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) have created policies that deal specifically with self-plagiarism. As compared to plagiarism, self-plagiarism is not yet very well-regulated. Some universities and editorial boards chose to not regulate it at all; they consider the term self-plagiarism oxymoronic since a person cannot be accused of stealing from himself. :)

[...] from both cohort and case-control studies always reflect true associations which can be universally generalized. Epidemiological research is, to a large extent, of an observational character as opposed to experimental research. One should not forget that observational epidemiological studies are subject to the influence of factors over which the investigators most often do not have full control, and that findings from these studies are less reliable than those of studies with an experimental research design. It is therefore imperative that findings from analytical epidemiological studies are critically scrutinized before any judgement of causality is made. Furthermore, findings from one single epidemiological study only exceptionally provide conclusive evidence of a causal relationship between exposure and disease.

This should include a large nationally representative population (rather than a referred population). Ideally, the sample should be a naturalistic one and not a concatenation of groups known to be either normal or abnormal (because this generally eliminates gradations in functioning that characterize children to whom screening tests are applied (e.g., those with below average but not disabled performance).

Reliability

Information should be included on internal consistency, inter-rater reliability, and test-retest reliability. Stability (longer-term test-retest reliability) is sometimes included although given the rapid changes in developmental performance set against a small set of items, stability indicators are not likely to be strong or meaningful.

Validity

Includes concurrent validity (a comparison of screening measures to diagnostic measures). Ideally concurrent validation should involve a test battery that samples the same range of developmental tasks measured by the screening test (e.g., if motor, language and academic skills are measured, the diagnostic battery should include motor, language and academic tasks). Discriminant validity studies are also desirable because they show how well a screening test detects the specific kinds of problems. In the case of broad-band developmental screens, discriminant validity studies should illustrate the extent to which the more common disabling conditions such as language impairment, mental retardation, learning disabilities, autism and cerebral palsy are detected, and for mental health screens, how well internalizing and externalizing disorders are detected. Predictive validity studies are not common but are desirable because they reflect how well screening test items and overall screening test performance measure enduring and meaningful dimensions of child development.

Oh please, stop all this validity and reliability and predictive value * & ^ %! Epidemiology is useless, it's junk science. The data are of inadequate quality. Bias and confounding are insurmountable under any circumstances. And even though you’ve done your best to control for all the confounders, there is either the possibility of residual confounding or even worse there is some confounder out there that you should have controlled for but you didn't even know it existed. This is an argument I refer to as the "unknown confounder" argument that is hard to beat.

Off topic, I was single when that book first got big. Nothing worse then a blind date where you try to bring up literature, and your only common point of reference is the davinci code. Then she brings up Harry Potter, which I never read, and she looks like the big reader. Then you try to blow her out of the water with like, I Claudius or Henry Miller...and you just look like an a-hole...

This should include a large nationally representative population (rather than a referred population). Ideally, the sample should be a naturalistic one and not a concatenation of groups known to be either normal or abnormal (because this generally eliminates gradations in functioning that characterize children to whom screening tests are applied (e.g., those with below average but not disabled performance).

Reliability

Information should be included on internal consistency, inter-rater reliability, and test-retest reliability. Stability (longer-term test-retest reliability) is sometimes included although given the rapid changes in developmental performance set against a small set of items, stability indicators are not likely to be strong or meaningful.

Validity

Includes concurrent validity (a comparison of screening measures to diagnostic measures). Ideally concurrent validation should involve a test battery that samples the same range of developmental tasks measured by the screening test (e.g., if motor, language and academic skills are measured, the diagnostic battery should include motor, language and academic tasks). Discriminant validity studies are also desirable because they show how well a screening test detects the specific kinds of problems. In the case of broad-band developmental screens, discriminant validity studies should illustrate the extent to which the more common disabling conditions such as language impairment, mental retardation, learning disabilities, autism and cerebral palsy are detected, and for mental health screens, how well internalizing and externalizing disorders are detected. Predictive validity studies are not common but are desirable because they reflect how well screening test items and overall screening test performance measure enduring and meaningful dimensions of child development.

Oh please, stop all this validity and reliability and predictive value * & ^ %! Epidemiology is useless, it's junk science. The data are of inadequate quality. Bias and confounding are insurmountable under any circumstances. And even though you’ve done your best to control for all the confounders, there is either the possibility of residual confounding or even worse there is some confounder out there that you should have controlled for but you didn't even know it existed. This is an argument I refer to as the "unknown confounder" argument that is hard to beat.

This should include a large nationally representative population (rather than a referred population). Ideally, the sample should be a naturalistic one and not a concatenation of groups known to be either normal or abnormal (because this generally eliminates gradations in functioning that characterize children to whom screening tests are applied (e.g., those with below average but not disabled performance).

Reliability

Information should be included on internal consistency, inter-rater reliability, and test-retest reliability. Stability (longer-term test-retest reliability) is sometimes included although given the rapid changes in developmental performance set against a small set of items, stability indicators are not likely to be strong or meaningful.

Validity

Includes concurrent validity (a comparison of screening measures to diagnostic measures). Ideally concurrent validation should involve a test battery that samples the same range of developmental tasks measured by the screening test (e.g., if motor, language and academic skills are measured, the diagnostic battery should include motor, language and academic tasks). Discriminant validity studies are also desirable because they show how well a screening test detects the specific kinds of problems. In the case of broad-band developmental screens, discriminant validity studies should illustrate the extent to which the more common disabling conditions such as language impairment, mental retardation, learning disabilities, autism and cerebral palsy are detected, and for mental health screens, how well internalizing and externalizing disorders are detected. Predictive validity studies are not common but are desirable because they reflect how well screening test items and overall screening test performance measure enduring and meaningful dimensions of child development.

Oh please, stop all this validity and reliability and predictive value * & ^ %! Epidemiology is useless, it's junk science. The data are of inadequate quality. Bias and confounding are insurmountable under any circumstances. And even though you’ve done your best to control for all the confounders, there is either the possibility of residual confounding or even worse there is some confounder out there that you should have controlled for but you didn't even know it existed. This is an argument I refer to as the "unknown confounder" argument that is hard to beat.

Well, the game's just began, renegade! :)

A very good way to put it, Elm! This whole discussion on epidemiology is just like opening a can of worms -- many people will begin to express their concerns about the inherent drawbacks of the epidemiological studies!

This should include a large nationally representative population (rather than a referred population). Ideally, the sample should be a naturalistic one and not a concatenation of groups known to be either normal or abnormal (because this generally eliminates gradations in functioning that characterize children to whom screening tests are applied (e.g., those with below average but not disabled performance).

Reliability

Information should be included on internal consistency, inter-rater reliability, and test-retest reliability. Stability (longer-term test-retest reliability) is sometimes included although given the rapid changes in developmental performance set against a small set of items, stability indicators are not likely to be strong or meaningful.

Validity

Includes concurrent validity (a comparison of screening measures to diagnostic measures). Ideally concurrent validation should involve a test battery that samples the same range of developmental tasks measured by the screening test (e.g., if motor, language and academic skills are measured, the diagnostic battery should include motor, language and academic tasks). Discriminant validity studies are also desirable because they show how well a screening test detects the specific kinds of problems. In the case of broad-band developmental screens, discriminant validity studies should illustrate the extent to which the more common disabling conditions such as language impairment, mental retardation, learning disabilities, autism and cerebral palsy are detected, and for mental health screens, how well internalizing and externalizing disorders are detected. Predictive validity studies are not common but are desirable because they reflect how well screening test items and overall screening test performance measure enduring and meaningful dimensions of child development.

Oh please, stop all this validity and reliability and predictive value * & ^ %! Epidemiology is useless, it's junk science. The data are of inadequate quality. Bias and confounding are insurmountable under any circumstances. And even though you’ve done your best to control for all the confounders, there is either the possibility of residual confounding or even worse there is some confounder out there that you should have controlled for but you didn't even know it existed. This is an argument I refer to as the "unknown confounder" argument that is hard to beat.

To date, it has been proposed that the superior cardiac protection provided by carvedilol is not a consequence of hemodynamic variances but rather is due to its additional antioxidant effects. Studies in animals suggest that antioxidant effects may be protective in myocardial ischemia and may help retard the progression of atherosclerosis. Carvedilol decreases nitric oxide, the chemical that causes endothelial dysfunction and apoptosis (programmed cell death). In addition, carvedilol decreases the expression of structural extracellular proteins, an effect that reverses cardiac remodeling.

fortified, winbow has already mentioned what you say, albeit tangentially.. now, maybe she's saying too many things (perhaps to make sure she's being all things to all people as it is the case when you can be nothing to everyone :) but she does mention the "remodeling" thing you explain in a little bit of more detail...

Don't you think it'd be better if you'd pay a little bit of more attention to the "remodeling" you're supposed to do yourself, Henning?

Stop it -- Scolari will add value to Chelsea too, just like he did to all the teams he's been part of; however, be careful -- it is not just reporters who are likely to feel well-known Phil's ire ... Opponents, such as Serbia's Ivica Dragotinovic - and even rival fans are equally likely to be on the receiving end. Scolari is unlikely, either, to approve of London's Bohemian tendency, having characterised his spell in Kuwait in terms likely to put the gay lobby on edge. "I don't like to see so many gays," declared Scolari. "If I find out that one of my players is gay, then I quickly get rid of him."

Yet at the same time, Scolari is an inspirational leader, citing the battle tactics of the sixth century Chinese warlord Sun Tzu as his own textbook and frequently describing his players as "warriors". He will not have come without getting the approval to bring his hand-picked team of assistants, headed by Flavio Teixeira - nicknamed Murtosa and known as his "eyes and ears" - men who - like Mourinho's cohorts Baltemar Brito, Silvinho Loura, Rui Faria and Andrea Villas Boas - know what he expects. What he demands, too, just like Mourinho, is unquestioned loyalty. When he sees it, as he does in his current Portugal squad, the praise comes out as a galvanising stream of reciprocated love. "I look at my players and their eyes are shining," he said after Wednesday's win over the Czech Republic. "They are supporting each other."

If not, however, they will be cut dead. It is a simple formula yet one which has proved very effective and made Scolari the world's best-paid manager. And it has given the man Brian Barwick let slip through England's grasp the opportunity to show what he can do.

Stop it -- Scolari will add value to Chelsea too, just like he did to all the teams he's been part of; however, be careful -- it is not just reporters who are likely to feel well-known Phil's ire ... Opponents, such as Serbia's Ivica Dragotinovic - and even rival fans are equally likely to be on the receiving end. Scolari is unlikely, either, to approve of London's Bohemian tendency, having characterised his spell in Kuwait in terms likely to put the gay lobby on edge.

New Chelsea manager Luiz Felipe Scolari is not expecting to take charge of his last match with Portugal just yet. Euro 2008 is Scolari's last competition after more than 5 years with the Portuguese national team. A win against Germany in the quarterfinals of the European Championship on Thursday would allow Scolari to stick around for at least another match before stepping down to take charge of the Premier League club. "I hope this is not my last game," Scolari said. "Our plan is to stay here (in Switzerland) until June 25, and I hope to beat Germany and continue as expected."

The final of the European tournament will be played in Austria. This is his last competition after more than 5 years with the Portuguese national team, which he led to the Euro 2004 final and the 2006 World Cup semifinal. The Brazilian coach said he expects his players to work even harder to keep it from being his last match. "From what I know them, from the friendship that I have with them, they will dedicate themselves even more," Scolari said. "And that's almost impossible because they have been giving all they have already." Despite his experience in major competitions -- Scolari won the 2002 World Cup with Brazil --, Scolari admitted he is anxious for the quarterfinal match against Germany in Basel.

"There is no way to be relaxed," he said. "In a final phase like this there are high expectations." He said his past with Brazil and Portugal can only help, though. "Sometimes you end up having to give confidence to the athletes even though you have doubts yourself," Scolari said. "But when you see the atmosphere like it is here, you just go out there and do what you have learned since the beginning of your (career)." As Brazil's coach in the 2002 World Cup, Scolari beat the Germans 2-0 in the final, with a goal by Ronaldo. "I would be happy if Cristiano Ronaldo scored this time," Scolari said. "But I will take a win against Germany with goals by anyone. The important thing is to advance." Portugal and Germany have met twice at the European Championship. They drew 0-0 in the first round in 1984, and Portugal beat the defending champions 3-0 in the group stage in 2000. Portugal lost the Euro 2004 final to Greece at home and were eliminated by France in the World Cup semifinals 2 years later.

Oh please, stop all this validity and reliability and predictive value * & ^ %! Epidemiology is useless, it's junk science. The data are of inadequate quality. Bias and confounding are insurmountable under any circumstances. And even though you’ve done your best to control for all the confounders, there is either the possibility of residual confounding or even worse there is some confounder out there that you should have controlled for but you didn't even know it existed. This is an argument I refer to as the "unknown confounder" argument that is hard to beat.

Exactly - so much argument for such a piece of epidemiology * & ^ %!

@ # ! * off!

Believe it or not, I know physicians (M.D.) who've gone into Public health — which is a shame because they are basically wasting their degree.

Being smart and successful in law is possible only for those armed with the "kill or be killed" mentality. Competition is inevitable, but in a cutthroat world that rewards street smarts and cunning — along with good connections and unlimited funds — conquering enemies is the necessary ingredient for true success. You want to know "everything-you-wanted-to-learn-in-law-school-but-didn't"? If you want to be a rule maker, then you must know the rules, which include be bold, don't sleep and be prepared to settle. It's not always pretty and it's certainly never fair, but the sooner one accepts the reality of this cold, hard business world, the sooner the competition will seem less threatening if not entirely inconsequential. Nice guys rarely finish first. Men and women who go to law school to learn how the system works so they can make the world a better place are fooling themselves and are likely not headed for super-success. Understanding how people, companies and laws really work — the "sophistication in litigation" — is what separates the winners from the losers.

gent, the question appears to be: is a business providing nothing but bathrooms ground for turd terrorism? And if it is, are the business's employees fair game? Is turd terrorism justified?

Does turd terrorism justify turd terrorism in return? Can turd terrorism even be justified at all? Is it ethical enough to place a bag full of turds against the door of your superior?

gent, the question appears to be: is a business providing nothing but bathrooms ground for turd terrorism? And if it is, are the business's employees fair game? Is turd terrorism justified?

Does turd terrorism justify turd terrorism in return? Can turd terrorism even be justified at all? Is it ethical enough to place a bag full of turds against the door of your superior?

Just imagine the guy taking a dump in a bag to be able to transport it to his superior's place of work! The entire house will smell great! Let's hope he'll do it some place else, on his way to work, in a nearby hotel or something like that!

Title: UEFA Probes Match-Fixing by Betting Syndicates
Post by: coin up in the air on June 28, 2008, 09:08:24 AM

Stop this * & ^ % - soccer is not any more about fair play - betting affects the results and many matches are fixed. In fact, last year European soccer officials asked Europol to investigate wide-ranging betting scams covering match-fixing in up to 26 high-profile European matches. The fraud, thought to be carried out by betting syndicates based in Asia, poses a serious threat to the integrity of the sport.

The 96-page dossier looks like the kind of glossy brochure Europe's governing soccer organization UEFA uses to market its leading international club competition, the Champions League. The flashy photo on the cover shows two players fighting for the ball with UEFA's motto "We Care About Football" emblazoned next to it. But what's inside the report will do little to improve the sport's image: it addresses betting manipulation in several big European matches. The dossier's potential impact is so massive that five UEFA officials took it in early November to the headquarters of the European Union's police agency Europol in The Hague to ask for help. The report details the criminal elements that are threatening the integrity of the sport -- and the billion-dollar entertainment industry built around it -- on a far grander scale than doping ever could. Abusing performance-enhancing drugs might attack the fundamental ideas of fair play and good sportsmanship, but betting scams and match-fixing shake the very foundations of the entire system. It could be soccer, tennis, or basketball: but if the result depends on corrupt backroom deals, the matches become reduced to nothing more than farce.

SPIEGEL has had unprecedented access to the UEFA document, which shows just how deeply an international network of organized crime has already penetrated European club soccer. The betting mafia has apparently bribed players, club officials and even referees to make easy money from gambling. The dossier given to Europol describes in detail how four important European cup matches were allegedly manipulated last summer. It also provides a confidential list of "Irregular Betting" documenting 26 matches UEFA believes were bought. At least 15 matches are thought to have been fixed during this season alone, the other 11 games took place from July 2005 through November 2006. They breakdown into the following competitions: 12 qualification matches for the UEFA Cup, eight for the Intertoto Cup, 3 qualification matches for the Champions League, two UEFA Cup matches, and even one qualification match for the European Championship (Euro 2008) next summer. The report for Europol cites specific incidents UEFA considers suspicious and provides pages of betting results as supporting evidence. For example, gambling cheats supposedly made €3.4 million ($5 million) alone on the home defeat of the Estonian club FC TVMK Tallinn against Finnish team FC Honka Espoo during an Intertoto Cup match in July.

The performance of another Estonian team, JK Trans Narva, is also thought to have been manipulated. The Estonians lost 0-6 in July to the Swedish club Helsingborgs IF, but even 25 minutes into the match, when the score was still 0-0, live bets wagering the guests would lose by at least three goals were still being made. The estimated winnings totaled at least €1.5 million. UEFA detailed an even more blatant case of likely match-fixing in mid July during the UEFA Cup contest between Serbian club FK Bezanija and its Albanian opponent KS Besa Kavajë. Most European betting shops placed lower limits on wagers on the game "as teams from Albania have a long history of manipulating matches," according to the report prepared for Europol. But about 45 minutes before kickoff something strange happened: Asian betting shops were suddenly overwhelmed by large sums wagering the favored Serbs would either win by only one goal, draw, or even lose the match. The unexpected "flood of money" UEFA describes hitting the bookies shortly before the game started caused "the Asian market practically to collapse." The match ended 2-2 with the Albanians managing to get the draw just before the final whistle and the bets placed raked in around €1.5 million. UEFA appears confident that members of the Serbian side were in on the scam: "This match followed all the classical signs of a manipulated match." Only one club on the list of allegedly manipulated matches has so far been brought before UEFA's disciplinary committee. Greek team Egaleo FC accepted a fine of 50,000 Swiss francs (€30,000) for "bringing UEFA and its competitions into disrepute" during a 1-3 loss to Lithuanian club FK Zalgiris Vilnius in July 2005. But last Thursday, UEFA took up the case of Bulgarian club PFC Cherno More Varna. Officials are convinced the team's players were involved in betting manipulation in a Intertoto Cup match played against Macedonian side FK Makedonija Gorce Petrov.

Title: Re: The Da Vinci crock
Post by: coin up in the air on June 28, 2008, 09:09:58 AM

Asia Is a Paradise for Betting Cheats

Asia, which continues to have a freewheeling gambling scene compared to Europe, is the center of the illegal betting on the UEFA matches. In Europe, gamblers often have to identify themselves, wagers are frequently limited to three-figure euro sums, and high-tech analysis applications like Betradar can sniff out suspicious movements of money in seconds. But Asia remains a paradise for cheats. Of course, there are also betting limits in Asia, but these are commonly the equivalent of €30,000 to €40,000 and punters are often allowed to place multiple wagers. So-called agents usually place the bets for shadowy moneymen calling from mobile phones in Europe and elsewhere, obscuring the origin of many wagers. There are also codes to inform the agents that a match has been bought. One of them is: "The valves are open." UEFA's dossier for Europol makes very clear the stakes involved: "People manipulating a match can easily bet €1 million to €2 million per match and make a similar profit of close to €1million to €2 million. For bigger tournaments the amount can be significantly higher. It's our strong suspicion that agents collecting bets for the Asian betting companies are often playing a major role in manipulating matches." Betting fraud isn't nothing new to Europe's soccer leagues, which have seen more than 20 major scandals since the year 2000. The Italian soccer federation was forced to level monetary fines against 3 top clubs in the summer of 2006, deducting points against them and even relegating one to a lower division. Six players were banned for several months and the mastermind was ejected from the sport for three years.

In Germany, the Croatian betting kingpin Ante Sapina and the corrupt referee he bought off Robert Hoyzer both landed in jail for manipulating matches. Czech soccer also uncovered gambling cheats -- seven referees and three former club officials were convicted only this October for influencing matches played by top-flight club FC Synot. But frequently, investigations into such incidents never truly build any momentum. On April 18, the head of Austria's professional soccer league, Georg Pangl, received a call around one hour before kickoff of the first division match between FC Superfund Pasching and SCR Altach explaining that a betting supervisor had observed "unusual wagers on halftime bets." Pangl informed the managers of both clubs, but he refrained from filing charges with the police because "the way the match played out didn't justify it." However, a police unit reported to Austria's federal criminal investigation agency in Vienna the next day that it had "concrete indications about a possible manipulation" of the match. A few weeks later Austria's federal police received another tip-off from their colleagues. This time it concerned suspicious matches involving one Austrian second division team. But there have been no discernable repercussions from these incidents despite the fact Austria will play co-host to the European Championship next summer.

The truth is, national sporting associations simply haven't been able to get very far on their own when it comes to investigating suspected betting scams and match-fixing. And UEFA realized this following the case involving the Greek club Panionios GSS FC. In December 2004, the suburban Athens club beat Georgia's FC Dinamo Tbilisi 5-2 after being trailing 0-1 at halftime. UEFA believes the match was manipulated on the basis of the starkly different performances by both teams in each half. The soccer officials also believe that "a considerable amount of the betting profit made was used to finance part of the players' salaries." The association's lawyers investigated the case for over a year. They heard the testimony of 12 people involved, including players in Greece, Italy and Georgia – their inquiry took them all the way to Australia. As one UEFA official followed the trail to Serbia, he was unmistakably threatened with bodily harm. But the case never came in front of the disciplinary committee "due to a lack of substantial evidence." However, following 15 cases of possible manipulation during this summer alone, it has become clear to everyone at UEFA that "the integrity of our competitions is at stake," according to a leading official at the association. "We can't touch this network with our regulations and choice of sanctions, we have to rely on international criminal prosecution."

Even before going to Europol, UEFA representatives had sought contact with police agencies. In October, there was meeting to exchange information with officials from Germany's federal investigators for organized crime. Following the meeting in The Hague, UEFA hopes Europol will add a new category on betting manipulation in professional sports into its Organized Crime Threat Assessment, which sets international policing priorities each year. Officials at Europol are particularly interested in the topic of money laundering and there's no doubt that gambling fraud is the perfect way to put money from the drug trade, prostitution, or weapons deals into circulation while adding a tidy profit on the top at the same time. The latest blow by Interpol against the illegal betting scene in Asia confirmed seems to confirm these assumptions. In October and November, investigators arrested more than 400 suspects following a five-month operation. They confiscated almost half a million euros, as well as computers, bank cards, mobile phones and cars, and closed almost 300 illegal bookie operations. Interpol announced from its headquarters in Lyon, France two weeks ago that Operation SOGA -- for Soccer Gambling -- had greatly reduced the influence of organized criminal gangs in Asia. Closer to home, UEFA is particularly concerned about Eastern Europe. Most of the clubs on the list thought to be involved in match-fixing come from Bulgaria, Georgia, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Baltic states. It was the soccer associations from these countries that helped the new UEFA President Michel Platini unseat the longtime incumbent Lennart Johansson in January. At the time, the Frenchman Platini had promised to increase eastern clubs' access to the Champions League. "It's exactly these people that UEFA now has to deal with," says a police official familiar with the case. "They have no other choice."

You people should be ashamed of yourselves! Anyway, we're not surprised - Austrians as well had Ballack's head superimposed on a naked body in one Austrian newspaper, with Josef Hickersberger's men urged to "rip their trousers off", with a ticket home for the Chelsea midfielder printed inside.

Ballack admitted a lack of respect from Austria was a motivating factor in knocking out the Euro 2008 co-hosts and sealing a place in the quarter-finals for Germany. Ballack responded with a free-kick at Vienna's Ernst Happel Stadium and knocked out Austria and set up a clash against Portugal in Basle on Thursday.

(http://img238.imageshack.us/img238/5774/article102710001a29ca10nf8.jpg)Payback: Germany's Michael Ballack is congratulated by his team-mate Arne Friedrich after scoring the winner.

(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6183/amgk6.jpg)German Chancellor Angela Merkel, comforts Germany's Michael Ballack after the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain in the Ernst-Happel stadium in Vienna, Austria, Sunday, June 29, 2008, the last day of the European Soccer Championships in Austria and Switzerland. Spain defeated Germany 1-0.

In Germany people love him and his team, whether they win or not. German players have some great fans and everyone would be proud to be citizen of a country like Germany.

Title: Re: The Da Vinci crock
Post by: A d r i a n on July 04, 2008, 11:05:01 AM

(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6183/amgk6.jpg)German Chancellor Angela Merkel, comforts Germany's Michael Ballack after the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain in the Ernst-Happel stadium in Vienna, Austria, Sunday, June 29, 2008, the last day of the European Soccer Championships in Austria and Switzerland. Spain defeated Germany 1-0.

In Germany people love him and his team, whether they win or not. German players have some great fans and everyone would be proud to be citizen of a country like Germany.

(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6183/amgk6.jpg)German Chancellor Angela Merkel, comforts Germany's Michael Ballack after the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain in the Ernst-Happel stadium in Vienna, Austria, Sunday, June 29, 2008, the last day of the European Soccer Championships in Austria and Switzerland. Spain defeated Germany 1-0.

In Germany people love him and his team, whether they win or not. German players have some great fans and everyone would be proud to be citizen of a country like Germany.

Oh * & ^ %, still making love to oneself!

I don't know what exactly do you mean Adrian, but he's a cutie! Exactly the type of guy I'd date!

[...] 'cuz my grandpa was given the drug even though it was absolutely contraindicated in patients with renal artery stenosis like him. He ended up in emergency room because of the deterioration in renal function that developed because of the ACEI therapy initiated (we did not press charges against the doctor treating him, his hospital settled in advance) [...]

Don't get me started with doctors and their stupid perscriptions! My aunt (my mother's sister) was perscribed monstrous amounts of aspirin for quite a few years. She was taken to the ER one night and underwent surgery for perforated ulcer. Not only that but she was also having an allergic reaction to the drug, probably because of the synchronous use of Motrin. She had some raised, red bumps all over her body (very itchy), and a scary swelling around her eyes, lips, hands, feet and genitalia.

Not only that but she was also having an allergic reaction to the drug, probably because of the synchronous use of Motrin. She had some raised, red bumps all over her body (very itchy), and a scary swelling around her eyes, lips, hands, feet and genitalia.

Stop it! I can not stand it when people blame doctors for things that can and do happen not because of their fault! My boyfriend is a doctor and he says it's not uncommon for aspirin and other NSAIDs to cause reactions of this kind.

http://img58.imageshack.us/my.php?image=jcr40048f1wj1.gif

Aspirin and NSAIDs may cause anaphylactic or anaphylactoid reactions. Constitutively-expressed cyclooxygenase (COX-1) inhibition is likely to be responsible for the cross-reactions and side effects associated with these drugs, as well as the anaphylactoid reactions sometimes seen in aspirin-sensitive respiratory disease. Though anaphylactic and anaphylactoid reactions may be clinically indistinguishable, they involve different mechanisms. Anaphylactic reactions are due to immediate hypersensitivity involving cross-linking of drug-specific IgE. Regardless of COX selectivity pattern, NSAIDs may function as haptens capable of inducing allergic sensitization. Unlike anaphylaxis, anaphylactoid reactions are most likely related to inhibition of COX-1 by NSAIDS. Thus, an anaphylactoid reaction caused by a particular COX-1 inhibiting NSAID will occur with a chemically unrelated NSAID which also inhibits COX-1 enzymes. Selective COX-2 inhibitors appear to be safe in patients with a history of NSAID-related anaphylactoid reactions but can function as haptens, with resulting sensitization and anaphylaxis upon next exposure.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/794078kl79727x75

Type I: Rhinitis and Asthma Induced by NSAIDs. Respiratory tract reactions to NSAIDs typically consist of rhinorrhea, bronchospasm, and layrngospasm. Patients will usually have a past history of asthma, nasal polyps, and/or rhinosinusitis. These reactions to NSAIDs are termed aspirin-induced asthma, aspirin sensitivity, aspirin intolerance, or more appropriately aspirin-exacerbated respiratory tract disease (AERD). During NSAID-induced respiratory tract reactions, levels of prostaglandin E2 are rapidly depleted due to COX-1 inhibition. In the absence of the braking effect of prostaglandin E2 on 5-LOX activating protein and 5-lipoxygenase, there is unrestrained synthesis of new leukotrienes and release of histamine from mast cells. Patients with AERD are particularly susceptible to the effects of leukotrienes that are manifested by excessive nasoocular and asthmatic reactions. This airway hyperreactivity may become severe enough to require intubation. Furthermore, patients will cross-react with most other NSAIDs because they also inhibit the COX-1 enzyme. Prior studies have demonstrated that most (or the vast majority of) patients with AERD can successfully undergo acetylsalicylic acid desensitization therapy.

Type II: Urticaria/Angioedema Induced by NSAIDs. Patients with a history of chronic idiopathic urticaria (CIU) will frequently experience an exacerbation of their urticaria/angioedema when challenged with acetylsalicylic acid or other NSAIDs. The prevalence of NSAID-induced urticaria in patients with CIU is between 20% and 30%. The pathogenesis of NSAID-induced urticaria is unknown, but similar to AERD, it appears that patients with CIU are sensitive to COX-1 inhibition by NSAIDs. Thus, these patients will cross-react with all NSAIDs that inhibit COX-1. It is believed that excessive leukotriene production by 5-LOX causes increased vasopermeability and subsequent urticaria. Patients in acetylsalicylic acid desensitization protocols have recurrent flare-ups of urticaria until the NSAID is withdrawn.

Type III: Urticaria/Angioedema Induced by Multiple NSAIDs. Some patients without a history of underlying CIU develop urticaria/angioedema after treatment with more than one NSAID that inhibit COX-1. These patients will usually experience urticaria/angioedema that is limited to the skin and extremities without accompanying anaphylaxis.

Type IV: Urticaria/Angioedema Induced by a Single NSAID. In patients without known risk factors for a NSAID reaction who experience urticaria and/or angioedema to a single NSAID, the presumed mechanism is believed to be secondary to an immunologic phenomenon related to IgE antibody production. A single NSAID acts as a hapten with subsequent production of drug-specific IgE antibodies against the NSAID. On repeat exposure to the same NSAID, patients will experience an immune-mediated phenomenon with histamine release related to drug-specific IgE antibody production against the NSAID. Assays to detect the specific IgE antibodies against NSAID haptens have been difficult to develop, however specific IgE antibodies were identified against acetylsalicylic acid in a patient with single drug-induced angioedema. Because these patients react to a single NSAID, antibodies to specific NSAIDs have been identified, and because these reactions occur after multiple exposures to the NSAID and no satisfying alternative mechanism has been discovered, it has been concluded that these reactions are probably IgE mediated.

Type V: Anaphylaxis Induced by a Single NSAID. Similar to a type IV reaction, a single NSAID can induce anaphylaxis via a presumed IgE-mediated reaction. Patients will not cross-react with other NSAIDs, but are rarely desensitized to the specific drug that caused the reaction given that the reaction is drug-specific to a particular NSAID. Similar to a type IV reaction, no specific data exists regarding efficacy of desensitization therapy, but in our experience desensitization therapy is successful a majority of the time if acetylsalicylic acid is specifically needed.

Asia, which continues to have a freewheeling gambling scene compared to Europe, is the center of the illegal betting on the UEFA matches. In Europe, gamblers often have to identify themselves, wagers are frequently limited to three-figure euro sums, and high-tech analysis applications like Betradar can sniff out suspicious movements of money in seconds. But Asia remains a paradise for cheats. Of course, there are also betting limits in Asia, but these are commonly the equivalent of €30,000 to €40,000 and punters are often allowed to place multiple wagers. So-called agents usually place the bets for shadowy moneymen calling from mobile phones in Europe and elsewhere, obscuring the origin of many wagers. There are also codes to inform the agents that a match has been bought. One of them is: "The valves are open." UEFA's dossier for Europol makes very clear the stakes involved: "People manipulating a match can easily bet €1 million to €2 million per match and make a similar profit of close to €1million to €2 million. For bigger tournaments the amount can be significantly higher. It's our strong suspicion that agents collecting bets for the Asian betting companies are often playing a major role in manipulating matches." Betting fraud isn't nothing new to Europe's soccer leagues, which have seen more than 20 major scandals since the year 2000. The Italian soccer federation was forced to level monetary fines against 3 top clubs in the summer of 2006, deducting points against them and even relegating one to a lower division. Six players were banned for several months and the mastermind was ejected from the sport for three years.

In Germany, the Croatian betting kingpin Ante Sapina and the corrupt referee he bought off Robert Hoyzer both landed in jail for manipulating matches. Czech soccer also uncovered gambling cheats -- seven referees and three former club officials were convicted only this October for influencing matches played by top-flight club FC Synot. But frequently, investigations into such incidents never truly build any momentum. On April 18, the head of Austria's professional soccer league, Georg Pangl, received a call around one hour before kickoff of the first division match between FC Superfund Pasching and SCR Altach explaining that a betting supervisor had observed "unusual wagers on halftime bets." Pangl informed the managers of both clubs, but he refrained from filing charges with the police because "the way the match played out didn't justify it." However, a police unit reported to Austria's federal criminal investigation agency in Vienna the next day that it had "concrete indications about a possible manipulation" of the match. A few weeks later Austria's federal police received another tip-off from their colleagues. This time it concerned suspicious matches involving one Austrian second division team. But there have been no discernable repercussions from these incidents despite the fact Austria will play co-host to the European Championship next summer.

The truth is, national sporting associations simply haven't been able to get very far on their own when it comes to investigating suspected betting scams and match-fixing. And UEFA realized this following the case involving the Greek club Panionios GSS FC. In December 2004, the suburban Athens club beat Georgia's FC Dinamo Tbilisi 5-2 after being trailing 0-1 at halftime. UEFA believes the match was manipulated on the basis of the starkly different performances by both teams in each half. The soccer officials also believe that "a considerable amount of the betting profit made was used to finance part of the players' salaries." The association's lawyers investigated the case for over a year. They heard the testimony of 12 people involved, including players in Greece, Italy and Georgia – their inquiry took them all the way to Australia. As one UEFA official followed the trail to Serbia, he was unmistakably threatened with bodily harm. But the case never came in front of the disciplinary committee "due to a lack of substantial evidence." However, following 15 cases of possible manipulation during this summer alone, it has become clear to everyone at UEFA that "the integrity of our competitions is at stake," according to a leading official at the association. "We can't touch this network with our regulations and choice of sanctions, we have to rely on international criminal prosecution."

Even before going to Europol, UEFA representatives had sought contact with police agencies. In October, there was meeting to exchange information with officials from Germany's federal investigators for organized crime. Following the meeting in The Hague, UEFA hopes Europol will add a new category on betting manipulation in professional sports into its Organized Crime Threat Assessment, which sets international policing priorities each year. Officials at Europol are particularly interested in the topic of money laundering and there's no doubt that gambling fraud is the perfect way to put money from the drug trade, prostitution, or weapons deals into circulation while adding a tidy profit on the top at the same time. The latest blow by Interpol against the illegal betting scene in Asia confirmed seems to confirm these assumptions. In October and November, investigators arrested more than 400 suspects following a five-month operation. They confiscated almost half a million euros, as well as computers, bank cards, mobile phones and cars, and closed almost 300 illegal bookie operations. Interpol announced from its headquarters in Lyon, France two weeks ago that Operation SOGA -- for Soccer Gambling -- had greatly reduced the influence of organized criminal gangs in Asia. Closer to home, UEFA is particularly concerned about Eastern Europe. Most of the clubs on the list thought to be involved in match-fixing come from Bulgaria, Georgia, Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Baltic states. It was the soccer associations from these countries that helped the new UEFA President Michel Platini unseat the longtime incumbent Lennart Johansson in January. At the time, the Frenchman Platini had promised to increase eastern clubs' access to the Champions League. "It's exactly these people that UEFA now has to deal with," says a police official familiar with the case. "They have no other choice."

Hi Valenta, I'm from that "era" too and we're all obsessed with Heyo Captain Jack, Alexia, Fun Factory and the like

http://youtube.com/watch?v=ozug-WU2B8U&feature=related

http://youtube.com/watch?v=4gyvF7Qs6rI&feature=related

http://youtube.com/watch?v=TYxhhTcZum4&feature=related

You forgot Nana - with all those hits - Lonely, I Wanna Fly (Like an Eagle), He's Coming

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99f_P5YKnX8&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJsNqcDokYI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9lbCrjqMKw&feature=related

Title: N i g g a 4 Life
Post by: no free haircuts on July 10, 2008, 09:49:33 AM

Nana has created some pretty controversial stuff -- take a look at the following, for instance: while at first sight it seems he's affirming himself as a black man, the very way the lyric goes makes you think other things as well..

I'm a n i g g a 4 life, I'm - a n i g g a 4 life, uh, I'm - a n i g g a 4 life, I'm a n i g g a 4 life, I'm a n i g g a 4 life

Remember me come with me on a ride and see - What it takes to survive to feel free –Like a bird in the sky – Then reach for the stars you wonder why –Freeze you begin to memorize – Receive daily negative vibes –Please see me down on my knees – Thank the Lord that I am black –And I'm proud to achieve – To achieve I repeat fakes and non-believers can't speak –I represent twent-four seven days a week – I creep through the streets hardly sleep toprevent defeat – The lord is my shepard makes me strong and unique – Consequently because of that you are week – Survival of the fittest still smile check my cheek –I am n i g g a for life black and proud yo let me speak

I'm a n i g g a 4 life, always judged by the covern i g g a 4 life, why do I have to suffer?n i g g a 4 life, word cuts like a knifeWhat can I do? I'm a n i g g a 4 life

I'm a n i g g a 4 life, I'm - a n i g g a 4 life, uh, I'm - a n i g g a 4 life, I'm a n i g g a 4 life, I'm a n i g g a 4 life

Concider the fact of being slaves – after four hundred years you realize you're diggingyour own grave – you reep what you saw I told you before – my colours is shine andand it's black beautiful – you begin to trip your mind's playing those tricks – How can a n i g g a like he be so fix – I know you read the title of this very song – sorry I can't help it causeI got it goin on – Don't waste my time cause time is money – A n i g g a always has to prooveand that ain't funny – Hurry hurry show me the money – You forget my colour all you seeis honey – Please, n i g g a n i g g a please n i g g a please – I only take you serious if you got the cheese – Survival of the fittest still smile check my cheek – I am n i g g a for life black and proud yo, let me speak!

I'm a n i g g a 4 life, always judged by the covern i g g a 4 life, why do I have to suffer?n i g g a 4 life, word cuts like a knifeWhat can I do? I'm a n i g g a 4 lifeI'm a n i g g a 4 life, always judged by the covern i g g a 4 life, why do I have to suffer?n i g g a 4 life, word cuts like a knifeWhat can I do? I'm a n i g g a 4 life

A n i g g a always has to proove and that ain't funny – Hurry hurry show me the money – You forget my colour all you see is honey – Please, n i g g a n i g g a please n i g g a please – I only take you serious if you got the cheese

(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6183/amgk6.jpg)German Chancellor Angela Merkel, comforts Germany's Michael Ballack after the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain in the Ernst-Happel stadium in Vienna, Austria, Sunday, June 29, 2008, the last day of the European Soccer Championships in Austria and Switzerland. Spain defeated Germany 1-0.

In Germany people love him and his team, whether they win or not. German players have some great fans and everyone would be proud to be citizen of a country like Germany.

(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6183/amgk6.jpg)German Chancellor Angela Merkel, comforts Germany's Michael Ballack after the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain in the Ernst-Happel stadium in Vienna, Austria, Sunday, June 29, 2008, the last day of the European Soccer Championships in Austria and Switzerland. Spain defeated Germany 1-0.

In Germany people love him and his team, whether they win or not. German players have some great fans and everyone would be proud to be citizen of a country like Germany.

(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6183/amgk6.jpg)German Chancellor Angela Merkel, comforts Germany's Michael Ballack after the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain in the Ernst-Happel stadium in Vienna, Austria, Sunday, June 29, 2008, the last day of the European Soccer Championships in Austria and Switzerland. Spain defeated Germany 1-0.

In Germany people love him and his team, whether they win or not. German players have some great fans and everyone would be proud to be citizen of a country like Germany.

Euro 2008 was the target of a credible terrorist threat, Swiss defense minister Samuel Schmid said in an interview published on the final day of the tournament. Schmid, also his country's sports minister, told Switzerland's NZZ am Sonntag that security forces had acted on information that "certain preparations had been carried out for an attack". The defense minister gave no precise details but said the incident was not related to a previously reported case involving vague threats made on a website. "I am talking about new evidence that we obtained during the tournament," he said. "The matter was taken up by the border authorities, police and secret service and there was no concrete problem after that." There's no way Ballack's team, Germany and its final performance against Spain could not have been affected. It appears Spanish players were better at handling the stress.

Copying words and books is random indeed. But have you ever heard about copying crimes? :) There's a movie called smth like Copycat paying tribute to the idea. Psychologist Dr. Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver) is an expert on serial killers. However, after one of her previous subjects, incurable psychotic Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick Jr), almost murders her, she becomes an agoraphobic, fearful of new attacks and living a terrified existence within the walls of her apartment. When a new series of murders begins which mimics the murders of famous serial killers down to incredibly precise details, detectives MJ Monahan (Holly Hunter) and Reuben Goetz (Dermot Mulroney) solicit Helen's help and expertise. Someone is imitating famed serial killers Albert Desalvo, Bianchi and Buono (aka the Hillside Strangler), David Berkowitz, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Serial killers Ted Bundy, Peter Kürten, and Edmund Kemper also are referenced. As the murders add up -- one victim turns out to be of Helen's gay assistant -- the "copycat killer" is revealed to be a lab technician named Peter Foley. He forces his way into Helen's apartment by disguising himself as a policeman. She is taken hostage to the place where Daryll Lee Cullum almost killed her. Foley tries to reenact the crime scene as closely as possible, even going so far as to kill another policeman at the scene just as had happened 13 months earlier. Detective Monahan shows up just in time. She shoots Foley in a climactic confrontation on a rooftop. The movie ends with Daryll Lee in prison, mailing a letter to yet another potential serial killer, continuing his efforts to destroy Helen Hudson.

Nana has created some pretty controversial stuff -- take a look at the following, for instance: while at first sight it seems he's affirming himself as a black man, the very way the lyric goes makes you think other things as well..

I'm a n i g g a 4 life, I'm - a n i g g a 4 life, uh, I'm - a n i g g a 4 life, I'm a n i g g a 4 life, I'm a n i g g a 4 life

Remember me come with me on a ride and see - What it takes to survive to feel free –Like a bird in the sky – Then reach for the stars you wonder why –Freeze you begin to memorize – Receive daily negative vibes –Please see me down on my knees – Thank the Lord that I am black –And I'm proud to achieve – To achieve I repeat fakes and non-believers can't speak –I represent twent-four seven days a week – I creep through the streets hardly sleep toprevent defeat – The lord is my shepard makes me strong and unique – Consequently because of that you are week – Survival of the fittest still smile check my cheek –I am n i g g a for life black and proud yo let me speak

I'm a n i g g a 4 life, always judged by the covern i g g a 4 life, why do I have to suffer?n i g g a 4 life, word cuts like a knifeWhat can I do? I'm a n i g g a 4 life

I'm a n i g g a 4 life, I'm - a n i g g a 4 life, uh, I'm - a n i g g a 4 life, I'm a n i g g a 4 life, I'm a n i g g a 4 life

Concider the fact of being slaves – after four hundred years you realize you're diggingyour own grave – you reep what you saw I told you before – my colours is shine andand it's black beautiful – you begin to trip your mind's playing those tricks – How can a n i g g a like he be so fix – I know you read the title of this very song – sorry I can't help it causeI got it goin on – Don't waste my time cause time is money – A n i g g a always has to prooveand that ain't funny – Hurry hurry show me the money – You forget my colour all you seeis honey – Please, n i g g a n i g g a please n i g g a please – I only take you serious if you got the cheese – Survival of the fittest still smile check my cheek – I am n i g g a for life black and proud yo, let me speak!

I'm a n i g g a 4 life, always judged by the covern i g g a 4 life, why do I have to suffer?n i g g a 4 life, word cuts like a knifeWhat can I do? I'm a n i g g a 4 lifeI'm a n i g g a 4 life, always judged by the covern i g g a 4 life, why do I have to suffer?n i g g a 4 life, word cuts like a knifeWhat can I do? I'm a n i g g a 4 life

I'm a n i g g a 4 life, n i g g a 4 life

As Barack Obama's bid for the White House grows in popularity, America has been forced to deal with race relations on all fronts of society. On ABC's "The View," a panel of respectable women discuss many topics and how it relates to women in society. On this particular episode, they decided to discuss the Jesse Jackson gaffe that was aired and released by Fox News. Who better to lead this discussion than Whoopi Goldberg?

The media will use this clip to show conflict on the popular tv show. I think it was actually a very valuable discussion that needs to be had. I'm sure Whoopi and Elizabeth Hasselbeck are much closer because of this…

Indeed, Ex, in a scene reminiscent of Rosie O'Donnell's days on "The View," hosts Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg got into a heated exchange over the use of the "N" word on Thursday morning. Tempers flared during a particularly sizzling session of the show's "Hot Topics" segment while the ladies discussed Jesse Jackson's recent off-air use of the "N-word" while preparing for an appearance on "Fox & Friends" weekend show 2 weeks ago. Jackson accused Barack Obama of talking down to African-Americans and used the term in question. Jackson has since issued two statements of apology for his remarks, but nerves were still raw as Whoopi and Elisbeth disagreed about the use of the slur being used, regardless of who is saying it.

We live in a world where pop culture uses that term and we're trying to get to a place where we feel like we're in the same place," Elisabeth said. "How are we supposed to then...move forward if we keep using terms that bring back such pain?"

"I can tell you how, here's how we do it, you listen and say 'Okay, this is how we're using this word and this is why we do it,' and you have to say, 'I understand that, but let's find a new way to move forward,'" Whoopi fired back.

"We don't live in different worlds," Elisabeth insisted, "We live in the same world."

However, Whoopi fiercely disagreed with her co-host, saying, "We do live in different worlds, it's just that way. It is Elisabeth."

When Elisabeth became visibly upset, tearing up, Barbara Walters jumped in the middle of the disagreement.

"Take a breath, let someone else talk," "The View" creator snapped.

Elisabeth continued, "This is a conversation that is hard, and we're going to have it here, and we have it here because we love each other."

Indeed, Ex, in a scene reminiscent of Rosie O'Donnell's days on "The View," hosts Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg got into a heated exchange over the use of the "N" word on Thursday morning. [...]

Indeed, Ex, in a scene reminiscent of Rosie O'Donnell's days on "The View," hosts Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg got into a heated exchange over the use of the "N" word on Thursday morning. [...]

Elizabeth is a bit weird.. take a look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYiHwubLcd8

Mrs. Hasselbeck is being paranoid I think.. I mean who'd @ # ! * i n g care that much as to create a fictitious character bearing her name to poke fun of her?! Who the @ # ! * does she think she is?!

Stop it -- Scolari will add value to Chelsea too, just like he did to all the teams he's been part of; however, be careful -- it is not just reporters who are likely to feel well-known Phil's ire ... Opponents, such as Serbia's Ivica Dragotinovic - and even rival fans are equally likely to be on the receiving end. Scolari is unlikely, either, to approve of London's Bohemian tendency, having characterised his spell in Kuwait in terms likely to put the gay lobby on edge.

New Chelsea manager Luiz Felipe Scolari is not expecting to take charge of his last match with Portugal just yet. Euro 2008 is Scolari's last competition after more than 5 years with the Portuguese national team. A win against Germany in the quarterfinals of the European Championship on Thursday would allow Scolari to stick around for at least another match before stepping down to take charge of the Premier League club. "I hope this is not my last game," Scolari said. "Our plan is to stay here (in Switzerland) until June 25, and I hope to beat Germany and continue as expected."

The final of the European tournament will be played in Austria. This is his last competition after more than 5 years with the Portuguese national team, which he led to the Euro 2004 final and the 2006 World Cup semifinal. The Brazilian coach said he expects his players to work even harder to keep it from being his last match. "From what I know them, from the friendship that I have with them, they will dedicate themselves even more," Scolari said. "And that's almost impossible because they have been giving all they have already." Despite his experience in major competitions -- Scolari won the 2002 World Cup with Brazil --, Scolari admitted he is anxious for the quarterfinal match against Germany in Basel.

"There is no way to be relaxed," he said. "In a final phase like this there are high expectations." He said his past with Brazil and Portugal can only help, though. "Sometimes you end up having to give confidence to the athletes even though you have doubts yourself," Scolari said. "But when you see the atmosphere like it is here, you just go out there and do what you have learned since the beginning of your (career)." As Brazil's coach in the 2002 World Cup, Scolari beat the Germans 2-0 in the final, with a goal by Ronaldo. "I would be happy if Cristiano Ronaldo scored this time," Scolari said. "But I will take a win against Germany with goals by anyone. The important thing is to advance." Portugal and Germany have met twice at the European Championship. They drew 0-0 in the first round in 1984, and Portugal beat the defending champions 3-0 in the group stage in 2000. Portugal lost the Euro 2004 final to Greece at home and were eliminated by France in the World Cup semifinals 2 years later.

(CNN) -- Should he stay or should he go? Manchester United insist Cristiano Ronaldo will still be wearing a red shirt next season but the Portuguese winger, courted by Real Madrid, has refused to rule out a move to Spain. Football Fan Zone presents five reasons why Cristiano Ronaldo should stay at Manchester United and five reasons why he should move to Real Madrid.

Let us know what you think below -- we will tally up your comments and announce the final score at the end of the week.

Stay

Loyalty:nchester United took a huge risk when they signed Ronaldo as an unproven 18-year-old for what seemed a vast sum of $25 million in 2003. Since then, under the tutelage of Alex Ferguson and Carlos Queiroz, Ronaldo has developed from a raw talent more famous for his stepovers into the most effective and consistent player on the planet. United also stood by Ronaldo when he was widely blamed in England for getting his club mate Wayne Rooney sent off during the 2006 World Cup. At 23, Ronaldo owes his best years to United, the club that has helped him fulfil that potential. He has almost four years left on a contract worth $240,000 a week -- making him United's best paid player -- and he should honor it.

Glory: Having dominated the English Premier League for the past two seasons and won last season's Champions League, Manchester United are a club in the ascendancy. With a young team boasting the attacking talents of Ronaldo and Rooney, outstanding young prospects such as Anderson and Nani and a solid defense built around Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic, United could be the preeminent force in European football for seasons to come. If football is primarily about winning trophies, rather than money or lifestyle, then Ronaldo should stay where he is.

The Premier League: The English Premier League is the most watched football tournament on the planet and increasingly the stage on which the world's best players want to showcase their talents. It was no coincidence that three of last season's four Champions League semifinalists came from the EPL. This week the current world footballer of the year, Kaka, has been linked with a big money move to Chelsea. Real Madrid may be the Spanish champions and one of the world's most famous clubs, but United are currently the biggest club in the biggest league in the world.

Continuity: Leaving a club is always a risk and there is no guarantee that a player will settle successfully into a new set-up in a different country, as Thierry Henry has discovered at Barcelona. At Old Trafford, Ronaldo is the undisputed star with a system built around him and teammates working for him. At Real Madrid he would be one ego among many. Real's Dutch midfielder Wesley Sneijder has already warned that Ronaldo's arrival on a massively inflated salary would not be welcomed by other squad members: "It would be bad for the dressing room if he gets a much higher salary than the rest of the squad. It's not important to me but I know other teammates would not like that at all."

Injury: Having been carrying an ankle injury since March, Ronaldo finally went under the knife earlier this month and is expected to be sidelined until at least October -- long after the summer transfer window has closed. Ronaldo should be concentrating on getting back to full fitness as quickly as possible rather than worrying about a possible transfer. A move to a new club would also likely put him under more pressure to play before he has made a full recovery.

Go:

A fresh challenge: Ronaldo has achieved everything he can in English football after two near perfect seasons at Old Trafford, winning back-to-back English Premier League titles and player of the year awards and a European Champions League winner's medal. If the 23-year-old is to continue developing he needs to find new challenges; what bigger challenge than joining Real Madrid -- the club of the "Galacticos" -- for a world record transfer fee?

Carlos Queiroz: The former United assistant manager was a big influence on Ronaldo's career and an important mentor figure. With Queiroz departing to coach the Portuguese national side, will Old Trafford hold the same appeal for his protege? Ronaldo has said he is prepared to "upset" Alex Ferguson and admits he has not spoken to the United manager in weeks while apparently taking advice from former national team coach Luis Felipe Scolari -- now managing United's biggest rivals Chelsea.

Money: Real Madrid are apparently prepared to make Ronaldo the most expensive and best paid player in the world. A transfer fee of around $140 million would smash the $92 million Real paid for Zinedine Zidane in 2001. On top of that, Ronaldo could command wages of up to $400,000 a week. By comparison, United have said they are not prepared to renegotiate Ronaldo's current deal worth $240,000 a week. In an industry driven by money, Ronaldo should go where he can command the highest wages.

Lifestyle: It's a long way from the sun-drenched beaches of Ronaldo's home island of Maderia to the dreary gray skies of the northwest of England. Madrid may not have any beaches either but at least the weather and the food are more familar and it's a lot closer to home. As a city, Madrid is far better suited to Ronaldo's southern European temperament than Manchester.

Real Madrid: Manchester United may be big but Real Madrid are in a league all of their own. With nine European Cups and 31 Spanish titles to their name, Madrid's achievements are unrivalled. Having written himself into Manchester United folklore, Ronaldo has the opportunity to do the same on the Bernabeu pitch once graced by the likes of Francisco Gento, Alfredo di Stefano and Fernec Puskas. Ronaldo may already have done enough to win this year's world footballer of the year award but a move to Madrid would likely seal that honor: in recent years Luis Figo, Zinedine Zidane, Brazilian striker Ronaldo and Fabio Cannavaro have all won the honor while wearing the most famous white shirt in sport.

To date, it has been proposed that the superior cardiac protection provided by carvedilol is not a consequence of hemodynamic variances but rather is due to its additional antioxidant effects. Studies in animals suggest that antioxidant effects may be protective in myocardial ischemia and may help retard the progression of atherosclerosis. Carvedilol decreases nitric oxide, the chemical that causes endothelial dysfunction and apoptosis (programmed cell death). [...]

Nowadays it is also thought that fish oil reduces the risk of atherosclerosis. A specific study examined the effect of a fish oil (FO)-rich diet on the development of atherosclerotic lesions in apolipoprotein E-deficient (apoE(-/-)) mice, which are vulnerable because of their high plasma cholesterol and triacylglycerol levels, focusing on the expression of endothelial adhesion molecules. Mice were fed semi-purified diets containing 5% corn oil (CO), rich in n-6 PUFA or menhaden oil as FO, rich in long-chain n-3 PUFA and 0.15% cholesterol after reaching 4 weeks of age, and they were killed when they were 4 weeks, 12 weeks, 18 weeks or 24 weeks old. Oxidative stress in plasma and aortic tissue was not increased in mice fed the FO-rich diet, despite its high peroxidizability index. A reduction of stenosis and intrusion at the aortic root, a decrease in the surface area of atherosclerotic lesions at the aorta and a decrease in P-selectin, vascular cellular adhesion molecule-1 (VCAM-1) and intercellular adhesion molecule-1 (ICAM-1) expression were observed in FO-fed mice compared to CO-fed mice. It seems likely that the reduced expression of VCAM-1 and ICAM-1 could be transcriptionally regulated by nuclear factor-kappaB in the aortic root. The protective effect of FO against atherosclerosis was more evident at early ages. In conclusion, FO reduces adhesion molecule expression in lesions in apoE(-/-) mice. Because these molecules are involved in lesion progression the effect of FO may explain the observed decrease in atherogenesis.

Fish oils combat weight loss in cancer patients

Cachexia (abnormal weight loss) is a major problem in many types of cancer especially cancer of the pancreas. Preliminary research has shown that supplementing the diet with fish oils, about 2.2 grams of EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and 1.4 grams of DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) daily, will stabilize weight in patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Now researchers at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh report that patients with pancreatic cancer can actually gain weight by consuming a nutritional supplement fortified with fish oils. The experiment involved 20 patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer (aged 18 to 80 years). The participants were asked to ingest two cans of fish oil-enriched nutritional supplement per day in addition to their normal food intake. The nutritional supplement provided 310 kcal per can and contained 16.1 g protein, 49.7 g carbohydrate, 6.5 g fat, 1.09 g EPA, 0.46 g DHA, and 28 essential vitamins and minerals. After three weeks the patients had gained an average (median) of 1 kg in weight and at seven weeks an average of 2 kg. A significant improvement in performance status and appetite was also noted after three weeks on the supplement. Other research has shown that EPA inhibits the growth of pancreatic cancer cells in vitro. It is therefore of interest to note that the average survival time among the patients was over eight months. This compares very favourably with the normal survival time of 4.1 months and is at least as good as the survival time that can be obtained with aggressive chemotherapy. The researchers conclude that a fish oil-enriched nutritional supplement has the potential to be a safe and effective means of preventing weight loss in cancer patients and may even increase survival time in patients with cancer of the pancreas.

Title: A Leading Cause of Death, but Less So
Post by: driven on August 08, 2008, 02:56:41 PM

Cachexia (abnormal weight loss) is a major problem in many types of cancer especially cancer of the pancreas. Preliminary research has shown that supplementing the diet with fish oils, about 2.2 grams of EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid) and 1.4 grams of DHA (docosahexaenoic acid) daily, will stabilize weight in patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Now researchers at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh report that patients with pancreatic cancer can actually gain weight by consuming a nutritional supplement fortified with fish oils. The experiment involved 20 patients with inoperable pancreatic cancer (aged 18 to 80 years). The participants were asked to ingest two cans of fish oil-enriched nutritional supplement per day in addition to their normal food intake. The nutritional supplement provided 310 kcal per can and contained 16.1 g protein, 49.7 g carbohydrate, 6.5 g fat, 1.09 g EPA, 0.46 g DHA, and 28 essential vitamins and minerals. After three weeks the patients had gained an average (median) of 1 kg in weight and at seven weeks an average of 2 kg. A significant improvement in performance status and appetite was also noted after three weeks on the supplement. Other research has shown that EPA inhibits the growth of pancreatic cancer cells in vitro. It is therefore of interest to note that the average survival time among the patients was over eight months. This compares very favourably with the normal survival time of 4.1 months and is at least as good as the survival time that can be obtained with aggressive chemotherapy. The researchers conclude that a fish oil-enriched nutritional supplement has the potential to be a safe and effective means of preventing weight loss in cancer patients and may even increase survival time in patients with cancer of the pancreas.

(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/04/15/weekinreview/15basics.600.jpg)From left: Fred Thompson, Elizabeth Edwards and Tony Snow have all announced that they have cancer.

By GINA KOLATAPublished: April 15, 2007

Last month, Elizabeth Edwards's breast cancer recurred. Then Tony Snow, the president’s press secretary, said his colon cancer was back. On Wednesday, Fred Thompson, the former Republican senator from Tennessee and a possible presidential candidate, said he has had lymphoma.

The National Cancer Institute reports that death rates have been declining since the early 1990s. The most recent data, from 2002 through 2004, show death rates falling by 2.6% a year for men and 1.8 percent a year for women. Men have more cancer and higher cancer death rates than women, notes Brenda Edwards, a statistician at the cancer institute, but part of the reason the death rate fell so much for men is that more of them have stopped smoking. Lung cancer is the biggest cause of cancer deaths in men and women. Other reasons for the decline in the cancer mortality rate in men and women, Dr. Edwards says, include better treatment, better care, and earlier detection. In men, death rates fell for 12 of the 15 most common cancers, including those of the lung, colon and rectum, and prostate. And, for women, death rates fell for 10 of the 15 most common cancers, including cancers of the breast, colon and rectum, cervix, and the ovaries. Cancer incidence has been flat recently, the cancer institute reports. But incidence is harder to interpret than mortality, explains Eric Feuer, a statistician at the cancer institute. One reason is cancer screening. The harder doctors look the more cancer they will find.

For example, prostate cancer rates rose by an unprecedented 16.2% a year from 1988 to 1992. The reason was that the P.S.A. test, a blood test for prostate cancer, was coming into widespread use and finding cases that otherwise might not have been found for years, if ever. Once all those cancers were found, there was less to find when the same men were tested in subsequent years. Incidence fell by 10.2% a year from 1992 to 1995. Now it is flat. For statisticians like Dr. Feuer, though, the death rates tell the real story and the story is heartening. "I was here at the N.C.I. when mortality was fairly flat," he recalls. "There was a lot of effort, but now it’s finally coming to fruition." GINA KOLATA

Copying words and books is random indeed. But have you ever heard about copying crimes? :) There's a movie called smth like Copycat paying tribute to the idea. Psychologist Dr. Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver) is an expert on serial killers. However, after one of her previous subjects, incurable psychotic Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick Jr), almost murders her, she becomes an agoraphobic, fearful of new attacks and living a terrified existence within the walls of her apartment. When a new series of murders begins which mimics the murders of famous serial killers down to incredibly precise details, detectives MJ Monahan (Holly Hunter) and Reuben Goetz (Dermot Mulroney) solicit Helen's help and expertise. Someone is imitating famed serial killers Albert Desalvo, Bianchi and Buono (aka the Hillside Strangler), David Berkowitz, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Serial killers Ted Bundy, Peter Kürten, and Edmund Kemper also are referenced. As the murders add up -- one victim turns out to be of Helen's gay assistant -- the "copycat killer" is revealed to be a lab technician named Peter Foley. He forces his way into Helen's apartment by disguising himself as a policeman. She is taken hostage to the place where Daryll Lee Cullum almost killed her. Foley tries to reenact the crime scene as closely as possible, even going so far as to kill another policeman at the scene just as had happened 13 months earlier. Detective Monahan shows up just in time. She shoots Foley in a climactic confrontation on a rooftop. The movie ends with Daryll Lee in prison, mailing a letter to yet another potential serial killer, continuing his efforts to destroy Helen Hudson.

Does reading about crimes in the newspaper or viewing criminal activity on television news or in Hollywood films produce more crime? Does media exposure of crime inspire copycats? Frequently cited examples include the Tylenol tampering incidents of 1982, the assassination attempt depicted in the 1976 film "Taxi Driver," and the availability of the Terrorist Handbook on the Internet both prior to and after the Oklahoma City federal building bombing in 1995. Other anecdotal evidence abounds. A 1993 movie that depicted a teen risking his life by lying down on a busy highway was said to have "inspired" a number of teens to try the same stunt, with several deaths resulting. An MTV Beavis and Butt-Head episode suggesting to kids that they burn down their homes led to a child trying to do just that.

The idea that media descriptions and depictions have a strong impact on behavior has been referred to in the media effects literature as the "hypodermic needle" model. Like a drug injection, the ingestion of violent or antisocial conduct impacts the psyche and may lead to repeating the behavior. Typically, however, those favoring censorship of criminal depictions do not believe they are impacted in such a way, but, nevertheless believe that some are. Children, imbeciles, the emotionally vulnerable, the undersocialized, and publicity seekers have been cited as in need of protection from negative media portrayals. Since it is impossible to predict how many might react by repeating the crimes, censorship helps to protect society for the possibility of copycat behavior. Until the 1980s there was little empirical research dealing exclusively with copycat crime. Empirical studies of media influence do not support the anecdotal evidence. For example, an Australian study used a 3-year timeframe to compare police data on bank and other armed robberies with local newspaper stories on robberies during the same period. Robberies were compared for two 7-day periods immediately before and after the date of any newspaper story reporting a successful robbery. There was no evidence of any copycat effect following newspaper stories or after possible word-of-mouth communication about the commission of high-value bank robberies. Research results did not support the idea that newspaper reports of successful bank robberies stimulate copycat robberies of banks or other targets.

Ray Surette has done extensive research on copycat crimes since the mid-1980s. He argues that copycat crime is a persistent social phenomenon, common enough to influence the total crime picture, but mainly by influencing crime techniques rather than the motivation to commit a crime or the development of criminal tendencies. A copycat criminal is likely to be a career criminal involved in property offenses rather than a first-time violent offender. The specific relationship between media coverage and the commission of copycat crime is currently unknown, and the social-context factors influencing copycat crimes have not been identified. Certainly, it can not be proven that a media depiction might stimulate an otherwise ordinary person to commit a crime. Although research has established the media's influence on some deviant behaviors, it has not established a direct causal connection between media stimuli and specific deviant behaviors apart from other variables appearing in combination. Simply because a media depiction is followed by the reoccurrence of a similar event does not indicate a connection. In some cases, alleged copycats have stated they knew nothing of the previous publicized incident.

Research is needed in the areas of long-term media effects, media models, and at-risk populations. For example, what is the long-term impact of viewing of thousands of violence acts in cartoons and television shows watched by children as they grow up? Surette also noted that copycat crimes revealed identifiable similarities among incidents. The copycat criminals seemed to fall into at least 4 groupings with some overlap. "Mode" copiers were those who already intended to commit a crime and who received a method from the media event. For example, a potential car thief copies the techniques seen on a television police drama for breaking into and hot wiring a car. "Group" copiers were those who copied acts in groups. In 1995, a group of Tampa, FL teens bragged to police they stole cars and shoot at robbery victims because earlier in the same week a 12-year-old repeat robber had been granted probation rather than prison. The case had been given major media attention. The other two categories were mentally ill or mentally deficient copiers, and terrorists. Since terrorism is partially driven by media attention, it is not surprising that terrorists choose to repeat methods that have produced high media ratings in the past. This has led concerned media executives to consider carefully how much attention they focus on terrorist acts. In spite of the fact that the evidence for copycat behavior is inconclusive, pressure groups continue to advocate both voluntary and mandatory controls on media depictions of crime and violence. Hearings were held in the U.S. Congress several times in the 1990s addressing these issues. While some compare the alleged threat similar to the comic book panic of the 1950s, attempts to curb media violence will continue.

(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6183/amgk6.jpg)German Chancellor Angela Merkel, comforts Germany's Michael Ballack after the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain in the Ernst-Happel stadium in Vienna, Austria, Sunday, June 29, 2008, the last day of the European Soccer Championships in Austria and Switzerland. Spain defeated Germany 1-0.

In Germany people love him and his team, whether they win or not. German players have some great fans and everyone would be proud to be citizen of a country like Germany.

Oh * & ^ %, still making love to oneself!

I don't know what exactly do you mean Adrian, but he's a cutie! Exactly the type of guy I'd date!

He's a babe!

Rebecca, not only he's a babe, but he's a babe I'd do *ANYTHING* on earth to be with! Even if that'd cost $1 million I'd find the money just to have sex once with the guy!

(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6183/amgk6.jpg)German Chancellor Angela Merkel, comforts Germany's Michael Ballack after the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain in the Ernst-Happel stadium in Vienna, Austria, Sunday, June 29, 2008, the last day of the European Soccer Championships in Austria and Switzerland. Spain defeated Germany 1-0.

In Germany people love him and his team, whether they win or not. German players have some great fans and everyone would be proud to be citizen of a country like Germany.

I don't know what exactly do you mean Adrian, but he's a cutie! Exactly the type of guy I'd date!

He's a babe!

Rebecca, not only he's a babe, but he's a babe I'd do *ANYTHING* on earth to be with! Even if that'd cost $1 million I'd find the money just to have sex once with the guy!

From a religious point of view, many critics, citing Dan Brown's own comments in various media interviews, claim that the book is a deliberate attempt to undermine Christianity in favour of a feminist/pagan agenda, and decry the many negative implications about the Roman Catholic Church and Opus Dei.

As early as August 1912, Jung had intimated a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-tones archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth psychology. This takes us to the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia. Pistis Sophia is an important Gnostic text. The five remaining copies, which scholars date c. 250­-300 AD, relate the Gnostic teachings of the transfigured Jesus to the assembled disciples (including his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Martha), when the risen Christ had accomplished 11 years speaking with his disciples. In it the complex structures and hierarchies of heaven familiar in Gnostic teachings are revealed. The female divinity of gnosticism is Sophia, a being with many aspects and names. She is sometimes identified with the Holy Ghost itself but, according to her various capacities, is also the Universal Mother, the Mother of the Living or Resplendent Mother, the Power on High, She-of-the-left-hand (as opposed to Christ, understood as her husband and he of the Right Hand), as the Luxurious One, the Womb, the Virgin, the Wife of the Male, the Revealer of Perfect Mysteries, the Saint Columba of the Spirit, the Heavenly Mother, the Wandering One, or Elena (that is, Selene, the Moon). She was envisaged as the Psyche of the world and the female aspect of Logos.

The title Pistis Sophia is obscure, and is sometimes translated Faith wisdom or Wisdom in faith or Faith in wisdom. A more accurate translation taking into account its gnostic context, is the faith of Sophia, as Sophia to the gnostics was a divine syzygy of Christ, rather than simply a word meaning wisdom. In an earlier, simpler version of a Sophia, in the Berlin Codex and also found in a papyrus at Nag Hammadi, the transfigured Christ explains Pistis in a rather obscure manner:

Quote

Again, his disciples said: Tell us clearly how they came down from the invisibilities, from the immortal to the world that dies? The perfect Saviour said, "Son of Man consented with Sophia, his consort, and revealed a great androgynous light. Its male name is designated 'Saviour, begetter of all things'. Its female name is designated 'All-begettress Sophia'. Some call her 'Pistis'."

The best-known of the 5 manuscripts of Pistis Sophia is bound with another Gnostic text titled on the binding "Piste Sophiea Cotice". This "Askew Codex" was purchased by the British Museum in 1795 from a Dr. Anthony Askew. Until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in 1945, the Askew Codex was 1 of 3 codices that contained almost all of the gnostic writings that had survived the suppression of such literature both in East and West, the other 2 codices being the Bruce Codex and the Berlin Codex. Aside from these sources, everything written about Gnosticism before World War II is based on quotes, references and inferences in the Patristic writings of the enemies of Gnosticism, a less-than-neutral source, where Gnostic beliefs were selected to present their absurdities, bizarre and unethical behavior, and heresy from the orthodox Pauline Christian standpoint. The text proclaims that Jesus remained on earth after the resurrection for 11 years, and was able in this time to teach his disciples up to the first (i.e. beginner) level of the mystery. It starts with an allegory paralleling the death and resurrection of Jesus, and describing the descent and ascent of the soul. After that it proceeds to describe important figures within the gnostic cosmology, and then finally lists 32 carnal desires to overcome before salvation is possible, overcoming all 32 constituting salvation. Pistis Sophia includes quotes from five of the Odes of Solomon, found in chapters between 58 and 71. Pistis Sophia was the only known source for the actual wording of any of the Odes until the discovery of a nearly-complete Syriac text of the Odes in 1909. Because the first part of this text is missing, Pistis Sophia is still the only source for Ode 1.

It is clear that Jung was seeing and defining what we call the Return of (to) the Feminine Energies or higher frequency of thought consciousness. Jung also channeled feminine archetypes including Salome.

Jung believed anima development has four distinct levels, which he named Eve, Helen, Mary, and Sophia. In broad terms, the entire process of anima development in a male is about the male subject opening up to emotionality, and in that way a broader spirituality by creating a new conscious paradigm that includes intuitive processes, creativity and imagination, and psychic sensitivity towards himself and others where it might not have existed previously.

Eve

The first is Eve, named for the Genesis account of Adam and Eve. It deals with the emergence of a male's object of desire, yet simultaneously generalizes all females as evil and powerless.

Helen

The second is Helen, in allusion to Helen of Troy in Greek mythology. In this phase, women are viewed as capable of worldly success and of being self-reliant, intelligent and insightful, even if not altogether virtuous. This second phase is meant to show a strong schism in external talents (cultivated business and conventional skills) with lacking internal qualities (inability for virtue, lacking faith or imagination).

Mary

The third phase is Mary, named for the Christian theological understanding of the Virgin Mary (Jesus' mother). At this level, females can now seem to possess virtue by the perceiving male (even if in an esoteric and dogmatic way), in so much as certain activities deemed consciously unvirtuous cannot be applied to her. As per Ken Wilber's terminology, this third phase seems to represent Up spirituality while the second phase represents Down spirituality.

Sophia

The fourth and final phase of anima development is Sophia, named for the Greek word for wisdom. Complete integration has now occurred, which allows females to be seen and related to as particular individuals who possess both positive and negative qualities. The most important aspect of this final level is that, as the personification "Wisdom" suggests, the anima is now developed enough that no single object can fully and permanently contain the images to which it is related.

Levels of animus development

As a male, Jung emphasized more on the male's anima and wrote less about the female's animus. Jung believed that every woman has an analogous animus within her psyche, this being a set of unconscious masculine attributes and potentials. He viewed the animus as being more complex than the anima, postulating that women have a host of animus images while the male anima consists only of one dominant image. Jung stated that there are four parallel levels of Animus development in a female, which can be personified into: the athlete, the planner, the professor, and the guide.

The athlete

Also referred to as the thug or the muscleman, Jung described it as the embodiment of physical power.

The planner

This stage embodies the capacity for independence, planned action, and initiative.

The professor

Also referred to as the cleric, it embodies "the Word."

The guide

Like "Sophia," this is highest level of mediation between the unconscious and conscious mind.

Anima and animus compared

The four roles are not identical with genders reversed. Jung believed that while the anima tended to appear as a single female, the animus usually consisted of multiple male personalities. The process of Animus development deals with cultivating an independent and non-socially subjugated idea of self by embodying a deeper Word (as per a specific existential outlook) and manifesting this word. To clarify, this does not mean that a female subject becomes more set in her ways (as this Word is steeped in emotionality, subjectivity, and a dynamicism just as a well developed Anima is) but that she is more internally aware of what she believes and feels, and is more capable of expressing these beliefs and feelings. Both final stages of Animus and Anima development have dynamic qualities (related to the motion and flux of this continual developmental process), open ended qualities (there is no static perfected ideal or manifestation of the quality in question), and pluralistic qualities (which transcend the need for a singular image, as any subject or object can contain multiple archetypes or even seemingly antithetical roles).

(http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/6183/amgk6.jpg)German Chancellor Angela Merkel, comforts Germany's Michael Ballack after the Euro 2008 final between Germany and Spain in the Ernst-Happel stadium in Vienna, Austria, Sunday, June 29, 2008, the last day of the European Soccer Championships in Austria and Switzerland. Spain defeated Germany 1-0.

In Germany people love him and his team, whether they win or not. German players have some great fans and everyone would be proud to be citizen of a country like Germany.

Oh * & ^ %, still making love to oneself!

I don't know what exactly do you mean Adrian, but he's a cutie! Exactly the type of guy I'd date!

He's a babe!

Rebecca, not only he's a babe, but he's a babe I'd do *ANYTHING* on earth to be with! Even if that'd cost $1 million I'd find the money just to have sex once with the guy!

Hahaha, webber, you're so funny - I mean, even the words, the sentence structure makes me laugh! Thanks for making my day! ;)

Well, Blaise Pascal once said, "The heart has reasons that the mind cannot understand."

Are you trying to trick us with this, ParkOperations?

Actually, Blaise Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons, of which the reason is ignorant." Put more simply, philosophizing is the dressing up in rational argument of moral beliefs, intuitions and desires.

Well, Blaise Pascal once said, "The heart has reasons that the mind cannot understand."

Are you trying to trick us with this, ParkOperations?

Actually, Blaise Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons, of which the reason is ignorant." Put more simply, philosophizing is the dressing up in rational argument of moral beliefs, intuitions and desires.

Karl Marx once compared philosophy to masturbation, essentially seeing both as privative, idealistic, and impractical activities. Indeed, many lay folk see philosophers as "wankers." But does Marx's jibe nonetheless mischaracterize masturbation? A thinker ofter associated with "intellectual onanism" is Martin Heidegger. Ontologically speaking, Heidegger's theories can be developed to show that masturbation it is not privative, but "stretched" in time and place. Moreover, masturbation plays a practical role in the creative development of the self, including the self's essential bodiliness.

"Only a being which, like man, 'had' the word... can and must 'have' 'the hand'" —Martin Heidegger

Stop this * & ^ % - soccer is not any more about fair play - betting affects the results and many matches are fixed. In fact, last year European soccer officials asked Europol to investigate wide-ranging betting scams covering match-fixing in up to 26 high-profile European matches. The fraud, thought to be carried out by betting syndicates based in Asia, poses a serious threat to the integrity of the sport.

The 96-page dossier looks like the kind of glossy brochure Europe's governing soccer organization UEFA uses to market its leading international club competition, the Champions League. The flashy photo on the cover shows two players fighting for the ball with UEFA's motto "We Care About Football" emblazoned next to it. But what's inside the report will do little to improve the sport's image: it addresses betting manipulation in several big European matches. The dossier's potential impact is so massive that five UEFA officials took it in early November to the headquarters of the European Union's police agency Europol in The Hague to ask for help. The report details the criminal elements that are threatening the integrity of the sport -- and the billion-dollar entertainment industry built around it -- on a far grander scale than doping ever could. Abusing performance-enhancing drugs might attack the fundamental ideas of fair play and good sportsmanship, but betting scams and match-fixing shake the very foundations of the entire system. It could be soccer, tennis, or basketball: but if the result depends on corrupt backroom deals, the matches become reduced to nothing more than farce.

SPIEGEL has had unprecedented access to the UEFA document, which shows just how deeply an international network of organized crime has already penetrated European club soccer. The betting mafia has apparently bribed players, club officials and even referees to make easy money from gambling. The dossier given to Europol describes in detail how four important European cup matches were allegedly manipulated last summer. It also provides a confidential list of "Irregular Betting" documenting 26 matches UEFA believes were bought. At least 15 matches are thought to have been fixed during this season alone, the other 11 games took place from July 2005 through November 2006. They breakdown into the following competitions: 12 qualification matches for the UEFA Cup, eight for the Intertoto Cup, 3 qualification matches for the Champions League, two UEFA Cup matches, and even one qualification match for the European Championship (Euro 2008) next summer. The report for Europol cites specific incidents UEFA considers suspicious and provides pages of betting results as supporting evidence. For example, gambling cheats supposedly made €3.4 million ($5 million) alone on the home defeat of the Estonian club FC TVMK Tallinn against Finnish team FC Honka Espoo during an Intertoto Cup match in July.

The performance of another Estonian team, JK Trans Narva, is also thought to have been manipulated. The Estonians lost 0-6 in July to the Swedish club Helsingborgs IF, but even 25 minutes into the match, when the score was still 0-0, live bets wagering the guests would lose by at least three goals were still being made. The estimated winnings totaled at least €1.5 million. UEFA detailed an even more blatant case of likely match-fixing in mid July during the UEFA Cup contest between Serbian club FK Bezanija and its Albanian opponent KS Besa Kavajë. Most European betting shops placed lower limits on wagers on the game "as teams from Albania have a long history of manipulating matches," according to the report prepared for Europol. But about 45 minutes before kickoff something strange happened: Asian betting shops were suddenly overwhelmed by large sums wagering the favored Serbs would either win by only one goal, draw, or even lose the match. The unexpected "flood of money" UEFA describes hitting the bookies shortly before the game started caused "the Asian market practically to collapse." The match ended 2-2 with the Albanians managing to get the draw just before the final whistle and the bets placed raked in around €1.5 million. UEFA appears confident that members of the Serbian side were in on the scam: "This match followed all the classical signs of a manipulated match." Only one club on the list of allegedly manipulated matches has so far been brought before UEFA's disciplinary committee. Greek team Egaleo FC accepted a fine of 50,000 Swiss francs (€30,000) for "bringing UEFA and its competitions into disrepute" during a 1-3 loss to Lithuanian club FK Zalgiris Vilnius in July 2005. But last Thursday, UEFA took up the case of Bulgarian club PFC Cherno More Varna. Officials are convinced the team's players were involved in betting manipulation in a Intertoto Cup match played against Macedonian side FK Makedonija Gorce Petrov.

Oh sure, this is nothing new - betting is on the up and up in European sports!

Copying words and books is random indeed. But have you ever heard about copying crimes? :)

There's a movie called smth like Copycat paying tribute to the idea. Psychologist Dr. Helen Hudson (Sigourney Weaver) is an expert on serial killers. However, after one of her previous subjects, incurable psychotic Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick Jr), almost murders her, she becomes an agoraphobic, fearful of new attacks and living a terrified existence within the walls of her apartment. When a new series of murders begins which mimics the murders of famous serial killers down to incredibly precise details, detectives MJ Monahan (Holly Hunter) and Reuben Goetz (Dermot Mulroney) solicit Helen's help and expertise. Someone is imitating famed serial killers Albert Desalvo, Bianchi and Buono (aka the Hillside Strangler), David Berkowitz, and Jeffrey Dahmer. Serial killers Ted Bundy, Peter Kürten, and Edmund Kemper also are referenced. As the murders add up -- one victim turns out to be of Helen's gay assistant -- the "copycat killer" is revealed to be a lab technician named Peter Foley. He forces his way into Helen's apartment by disguising himself as a policeman. She is taken hostage to the place where Daryll Lee Cullum almost killed her. Foley tries to reenact the crime scene as closely as possible, even going so far as to kill another policeman at the scene just as had happened 13 months earlier. Detective Monahan shows up just in time. She shoots Foley in a climactic confrontation on a rooftop. The movie ends with Daryll Lee in prison, mailing a letter to yet another potential serial killer, continuing his efforts to destroy Helen Hudson.

Does reading about crimes in the newspaper or viewing criminal activity on television news or in Hollywood films produce more crime? Does media exposure of crime inspire copycats? Frequently cited examples include the Tylenol tampering incidents of 1982, the assassination attempt depicted in the 1976 film "Taxi Driver," and the availability of the Terrorist Handbook on the Internet both prior to and after the Oklahoma City federal building bombing in 1995. Other anecdotal evidence abounds. A 1993 movie that depicted a teen risking his life by lying down on a busy highway was said to have "inspired" a number of teens to try the same stunt, with several deaths resulting. An MTV Beavis and Butt-Head episode suggesting to kids that they burn down their homes led to a child trying to do just that.

The idea that media descriptions and depictions have a strong impact on behavior has been referred to in the media effects literature as the "hypodermic needle" model. Like a drug injection, the ingestion of violent or antisocial conduct impacts the psyche and may lead to repeating the behavior. Typically, however, those favoring censorship of criminal depictions do not believe they are impacted in such a way, but, nevertheless believe that some are. Children, imbeciles, the emotionally vulnerable, the undersocialized, and publicity seekers have been cited as in need of protection from negative media portrayals. Since it is impossible to predict how many might react by repeating the crimes, censorship helps to protect society for the possibility of copycat behavior. Until the 1980s there was little empirical research dealing exclusively with copycat crime. Empirical studies of media influence do not support the anecdotal evidence. For example, an Australian study used a 3-year timeframe to compare police data on bank and other armed robberies with local newspaper stories on robberies during the same period. Robberies were compared for two 7-day periods immediately before and after the date of any newspaper story reporting a successful robbery. There was no evidence of any copycat effect following newspaper stories or after possible word-of-mouth communication about the commission of high-value bank robberies. Research results did not support the idea that newspaper reports of successful bank robberies stimulate copycat robberies of banks or other targets.

Ray Surette has done extensive research on copycat crimes since the mid-1980s. He argues that copycat crime is a persistent social phenomenon, common enough to influence the total crime picture, but mainly by influencing crime techniques rather than the motivation to commit a crime or the development of criminal tendencies. A copycat criminal is likely to be a career criminal involved in property offenses rather than a first-time violent offender. The specific relationship between media coverage and the commission of copycat crime is currently unknown, and the social-context factors influencing copycat crimes have not been identified. Certainly, it can not be proven that a media depiction might stimulate an otherwise ordinary person to commit a crime. Although research has established the media's influence on some deviant behaviors, it has not established a direct causal connection between media stimuli and specific deviant behaviors apart from other variables appearing in combination. Simply because a media depiction is followed by the reoccurrence of a similar event does not indicate a connection. In some cases, alleged copycats have stated they knew nothing of the previous publicized incident.

Research is needed in the areas of long-term media effects, media models, and at-risk populations. For example, what is the long-term impact of viewing of thousands of violence acts in cartoons and television shows watched by children as they grow up? Surette also noted that copycat crimes revealed identifiable similarities among incidents. The copycat criminals seemed to fall into at least 4 groupings with some overlap. "Mode" copiers were those who already intended to commit a crime and who received a method from the media event. For example, a potential car thief copies the techniques seen on a television police drama for breaking into and hot wiring a car. "Group" copiers were those who copied acts in groups. In 1995, a group of Tampa, FL teens bragged to police they stole cars and shoot at robbery victims because earlier in the same week a 12-year-old repeat robber had been granted probation rather than prison. The case had been given major media attention. The other two categories were mentally ill or mentally deficient copiers, and terrorists. Since terrorism is partially driven by media attention, it is not surprising that terrorists choose to repeat methods that have produced high media ratings in the past. This has led concerned media executives to consider carefully how much attention they focus on terrorist acts. In spite of the fact that the evidence for copycat behavior is inconclusive, pressure groups continue to advocate both voluntary and mandatory controls on media depictions of crime and violence. Hearings were held in the U.S. Congress several times in the 1990s addressing these issues. While some compare the alleged threat similar to the comic book panic of the 1950s, attempts to curb media violence will continue.

cameo, does your avatar show matryoshka dolls? Матрёшка is traditionally associated with a fat, robust Russian woman. Wiki says that a set of matryoshkas consists of a wooden figure which can be pulled apart to reveal another figure of the same sort inside. It has, in turn, another figure inside, and so on. The number of nested figures is usually 5 or more. The shape is mostly cylindrical, rounded at the top for the head and tapered towards the bottom, but little else; the dolls have no hands (except those that are painted). Traditionally the outer layer is a woman, dressed in a sarafan, holding a rooster. Inside, it contains other figures that may be of both genders, usually ending in a baby that does not open. Matryoshkas are often designed to follow a particular theme, for instance peasant girls in traditional dress, but the theme can be anything, from fairy tale characters to Soviet leaders. A doll which represents an old woman is often called a baboushka or babushka, that which represents an old man a dedoushka or dedushka.

Matryoshkas are also used metaphorically, as a design paradigm, known as the "matryoshka principle" or "nested doll principle". It denotes a recognizable relationship of "similar object-within-similar object" that appears in the design of many other natural and man-made objects. Examples include the Matryoshka brain and the Matroska media container format. The onion metaphor is of similar character. If you peel the outer layer off an onion, a similar onion exists within the outer layer. This structure is employed by designers in applications such as the layering of clothes or the design of tables, where a smaller table sits within a larger table and a yet smaller one within that, similar to onion routing.

Tom Cruise is nothing when it comes to closet cases. Have you heard about Elvis Costello?

(http://gaynewsbits.com/images/elton-john-elvis-costello.jpg)

And to think he's a bigot and a racist (but what I am talking about -- is it not that the biggest bigots are those who can easily be bigoted)

During a drunken argument with Stephen Stills and Bonnie Bramlett in a Columbus, Ohio, Holiday Inn hotel bar, in the late 1970s Costello referred to James Brown as a "jive-ass n i g g e r," then upped the ante by pronouncing Ray Charles a "blind, ignorant n i g g e r."

A contrite Costello apologised at a New York City press conference a few days later, claiming that he had been drunk and had been attempting to be obnoxious in order to bring the conversation to a swift conclusion, not anticipating that Bramlett would bring his comments to the press. According to Costello, "it became necessary for me to outrage these people with about the most obnoxious and offensive remarks that I could muster." In his liner notes for the expanded version of Get Happy!!, Costello writes that some time after the incident he had declined an offer to meet Charles out of guilt and embarrassment, though Charles himself had forgiven Costello ("Drunken talk isn't meant to be printed in the paper"). In a Rolling Stone interview with Greil Marcus, he recounts an incident when Bruce Thomas was introduced to Michael Jackson as Costello's bass player and Jackson said, "I don't dig that guy..."

There's no evidence that Costello was a racist -- he'd been active in Rock Against Racism before it was fashionable and was too smart in any event to let it show if he was -- but he was being as stupid, reckless and out of control as any of the broken-down '60s stars his energy, brains and invective were supposed to be an antidote for.

Title: Tor
Post by: batteries not included on September 10, 2008, 05:13:57 PM

Matryoshkas are also used metaphorically, as a design paradigm, known as the "matryoshka principle" or "nested doll principle". It denotes a recognizable relationship of "similar object-within-similar object" that appears in the design of many other natural and man-made objects. Examples include the Matryoshka brain and the Matroska media container format. The onion metaphor is of similar character. If you peel the outer layer off an onion, a similar onion exists within the outer layer. This structure is employed by designers in applications such as the layering of clothes or the design of tables, where a smaller table sits within a larger table and a yet smaller one within that, similar to onion routing.

Tor (The Onion Router) is a free software implementation of second-generation onion routing – a system enabling its users to communicate anonymously on the Internet. Originally sponsored by the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor became an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) project in late 2004, and the EFF supported Tor financially until November 2005. The Tor software is now developed by the Tor Project, which since December 2006 is a 501(c)(3) research/education non-profit organization based in the United States of America that receives a diverse base of financial support. Like all current low latency anonymity networks, Tor is vulnerable to traffic analysis from observers who can watch both ends of a user's connection.

Tor can also provide anonymity to servers in the form of location-hidden services, which are Tor clients or relays running specially configured server software. Rather than revealing the server's IP address (and therefore its location), hidden services are accessed through the Tor-specific .onion pseudo top-level domain. The Tor network understands this TLD and routes data anonymously both to and from the hidden service. Due to this lack of a public address, hidden services may be hosted behind firewalls or NAT. A Tor client is necessary in order to access a hidden service. Hidden services have been deployed on the Tor network beginning in 2004. Being decentralized by design, there is no official index of hidden services. There are a number of independent hidden services that serve this purpose. Because location-hidden services do not use exit nodes, they are not subject to exit node eavesdropping. There are, however, a number of security issues involving Tor hidden services. For example, services that are reachable through Tor hidden services and the public Internet are susceptible to correlation attacks, and consequently are not necessarily hidden. Other pitfalls include "letting your web server reveal identifying information about you, your computer, or your location," uptime and downtime statistics, intersection attacks and user error.

Title: YouTube to McCain: No DMCA pass for you
Post by: currency on October 15, 2008, 12:04:53 PM

YouTube has deflected the McCain campaign’s request for special treatment on takedown requests the site receives under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). In a letter from YouTube Chief Counsel Zahavah Levine sent Tuesday, a day after the McCain camp sent their request,

the site acknowledged the import of the presidential election, but cited its desire to be fair to all of its users, and to not give preference to any cause:

Quote

While we agree with you that the US presidential election-related content is invaluable and worthy of the highest level of protection, there is a lot of other content on our global site that our users around the world find to be equally important, including, by way of example only, political campaigns from around the globe at all levels of government, human rights movements, and other important voices. We try to be careful not to favor one category of content on our site over others, and to treat all of our users fairly, regardless of whether they are an individual, a large corporation, or a candidate for public office.

PCMag has a good rundown of the process with which the McCain campaign is taking issue:

Quote

If someone spots a video on a site like YouTube that they believe to contain copyrighted material, they can file a DMCA takedown notice with YouTube. YouTube will remove the video and notify the person who posted it. If the owner believes they are within their rights to post the material, they can file a counter notification and YouTube will investigate. If the video is found to contain no offending material, YouTube must re-post the video within 10 to 14 days.

McCain campaign web ads such as one that used a Katie Couric quip about sexism in the campaign had been served with these DMCA takedown notices and taken down by YouTube. The McCain campaign argues that such takedowns shouldn't be made without an examination of whether they do in fact infringe on a copyright holder's rights. Techdirt had news of the McCain campaign's Monday request for "a full legal review of all takedown notices on accounts controlled by ... political candidates and campaigns" on Tuesday, and it pointed out how unusual it was for a political campaign to bring up fair use at all, let alone champion it. In its response to the McCain camp, YouTube's Levine turned the "fair use" discussion back to DMCA abusers:

Quote

The real problem here is individuals and entities that abuse the DMCA takedown process...

We look forward to working with Senator (or President) McCain on ways to combat abuse of the DMCA takedown process on YouTube, including by way of example, strengthening the fair use doctrine

Whether the McCain campaign succeeds in getting its web ads reposted on the site, the real winner in all of this appears to be fair use. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Fred von Lohmann wrote in a blog post Tuesday, "it's heartening to see a presidential campaign recognize the importance of fair use and 'remix culture.'"

Copyright issues have traditionally been not given the importance they deserve. That's have been the case even in the US, let alone in less developed countries. When I was in school in Russia I remember many professiors who'd translate books from English to Russian and publish it as if they had written it themselves, under their own name. We as students would not mind it had the books been translated correctly.. but these "professors" did not even know English good enough!

Not every book that comes out in the US is a candidate for a foreign deal. For those that are however, the overseas market, while not likely to make the publisher or the author rich beyond their wildest imaginations, is definitely worth exploring. And of course by "foreign" I mean a deal made by an owner in the United States with a publisher in another nation. There are essentially 2 and perhaps 3 forms of foreign deals. The first is the right that the owner of foreign rights has to license the translation of the English version of the book into a foreign language. The second is the right to license the reprint of the book in the English language and sell the same in a local territory. There is also an export deal in which the American publisher sells the very same book that is distributed in the U.S. to a foreign publisher at a discount. The foreign publisher merely is distributing the U.S. book in that territory.

The question as to who owns the right to make these deals is the subject of the agreement between author and publisher. Since copyright initially resides in the creator of the work-usually the author unless it is a work for hire situation-how much of that bundle of rights called copyright the author gives away is what that agreement is all about. Part of the negotiation will involve foreign rights of the sorts mentioned above. However, there are often other parties who may have rights that may prevent the making of a foreign deal including but not limited to artists, illustrators, editors and even, in some instances, distributors and other parties. Therefore, the publisher must carefully review all of its agreements (or the lack of such agreements) to make sure it can actually make a foreign deal.

The normal kind of deal for a book that originally was published in the US generally involves a royalty and hopefully an advance against that royalty. The size of the advance varies depending upon the size of the market and the success or lack of it that the book enjoyed in the U.S. among other factors. For example, reprint rights to a large territory, such as the UK or Germany, might bring a larger advance than a similar deal for Portugal. The same for translations. And since all books are not interchangeable, the rule of thumb for determining the size of the advance is based upon the "WYCG" approach. "WYCG" is the technical legal term for "Whatever You Can Get." If the buyer feels the book is going to do particularly well in the territory, that buyer may be willing to pay a larger advance for the rights. In all negotiations, the end result depends upon the relative bargaining position of the parties. The advance will be applied against a royalty rate that varies and which is likely to be based upon the retail price or cover price in the market. However, there may be other royalty provisions for foreign book clubs, flat fee licenses made by the foreign licensee and so on. The actual royalties in turn may be subject to other calculations that may reduce the effective royalty from the stated rate and these factors should be the subject of negotiation as well.

http://www.ivanhoffman.com/royalties.html

In the export deal, the American publisher sells the book directly to the foreign publisher at a discount from the cover or retail price, not unlike a sale to an American distributor. Here, however, the American publisher may seek payment in full in advance before shipping. How the books will be shipped may be another issue. In both the translation and reprint deals, shipping is generally not an issue. Diskettes or electronic transfer may suffice to get the book to the foreign publisher. The owner of the foreign rights may elect to sell separate territorial rights to separate licensees or make an overall deal for several territories with one licensee. In the latter event, the advance that is paid can be separately allocated by territory and provide that there shall be no "cross-collateralization" between or among territories. This means that if the book does well in one territory and recoups the advance paid for that territory, the excess royalties due the American licensor may not be used to recoup any other unrecouped advance from another territory. Obviously, having different licensees in different countries can be an accounting headache for the small publisher but it may be otherwise worthwhile not to put all one's literary eggs into the basket of a single licensee, at least until the relationship has proven itself.

THE TERRITORY

Additionally, it should be made clear that the license to the foreign publisher does not include the right to export from the territory into other territories. This is a subtle but important point since a local publisher may feel that because they own rights for the territory such rights include the right to sell to exporters *in* the territory even though the ultimate sales may take place *outside* the territory. By including the "rest of the world is an open market" clause (which many "form" agreements provide), the American publisher may be cutting itself off from other sales. Example: if you sell exclusive Portuguese language rights to a licensee for Portugal and your agreement prevents "open market" sales, you can perhaps make an exclusive Portuguese rights deal for Brazil. But if your contract allows for open market sales by the licensee, it means that sales in that open market, which is, in this example, a Portuguese language version sold in other Portuguese-speaking countries such as Brazil or Macao, as a practical matter may cut off your ability to make an additional deal. "As a practical matter" because although such "open market sales" are usually on a non-exclusive basis, that original licensee is already in print with the book in these open market countries and your ability to make a competing deal is unlikely. Not only do you then lose the additional advance, but you often also receive a lower royalty on these open market sales since there is a sub-licensee involved. Now imagine if the deal were for Spanish language rights in Spain. If you do not restrict the open market language in the deal with the Spanish licensee, you could be losing the practical ability to make other Spanish language deals in all of the countries of the world where Spanish is spoken.

THE EUROPEAN UNION ISSUE

We have a growing phenomenon in the financial world today called "common markets." For example, there are 25 member states within the European Union (EU). Such a union represents a single market for social, agricultural and fiscal policies as well as the development of a single monetary currency. The EU allows for the free movement of products across what would otherwise be international boundaries. There are several sub-unions as well: The Benelux nations (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg) started in 1948. There is also the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) comprised of Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway and Sweden. We also now have the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and many other trading relationships throughout the world. All of these are attempts to form an economic trading block to benefit member states in their economic relations with non-member states. The EU for example, requires that when a deal is made in one territory, the licensee shall have the right to sell the book in all member states as well. So the concept of "territory" must be clearly defined in your agreement. And this becomes even more important with English language reprint deals. If you do not restrict the territory and you, as a publisher following the "standard" form you used without professional advice include this "open market" language, you could be losing substantial monies since now you have a competing book being sold, even if on a non-exclusive basis, everywhere in the world.

What do you get when you mix P2P, inexpensive digital input devices, open source software, easy editing tools, and reasonably affordable bandwidth? Potentially, you get what Lawrence Lessig calls remix culture: a rich, diverse outpouring of creativity based on creativity. This is not a certain future, however. Peer-to-peer is on the verge of being effectively outlawed. Continuation of the current copyright regime would mean that vast quantities of creative content will be forever locked away from remix artists.

Lessig is joining the battle for the remix future on several fronts: the court battle on the legality of P2P; another legal battle to free "orphan works" from their copyright gulag; rolling out new Creative Commons "sampling licenses" with the help of big-name artists like David Byrne; and supporting the "free culture" work of Brazilian musician and culture minister Gilberto Gil toward a society based on freedom of culture.

Indeed, Ex, in a scene reminiscent of Rosie O'Donnell's days on "The View," hosts Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg got into a heated exchange over the use of the "N" word on Thursday morning. [...]

Elizabeth is a bit weird.. take a look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYiHwubLcd8

Mrs. Hasselbeck is being paranoid I think.. I mean who'd @ # ! * i n g care that much as to create a fictitious character bearing her name to poke fun of her?! Who the @ # ! * does she think she is?!

(TAMPA) Usually it's country music singers who introduce Sarah Palin on the campaign trail, but here in Florida on Sunday, a different kind of entertainer is set to stump with the Alaska governor. "The View" co-host Elisabeth Hasselbeck will introduce Palin at rallies in Tampa and Kissimmee, along the I-4 Corridor, which is considered the most important swing region in this critical battleground state. Hasselbeck is a frequent defender of Palin on the ABC talk show, and her presence is sure to bring additional excitement to the large crowd that has already gathered here in Tampa. Later on Sunday, Palin will head to Asheville, a city in the Appalachian region of North Carolina — a state the Republicans had hoped to lock up long ago but where polls remain tight.

The theory publicized in 1997 in the pseudohistorical book The Templar Revelation by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince, that the person to the left of Jesus (to his right) is actually Mary Magdalene, rather than the apostle John (as most art historians identify the figure). This theory was central to Dan Brown's popular 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code. In the novel, it is said that John/Mary Magdalene has a womanly bosom, feminine facial features, and is swaying gracefully toward Peter. Peter appears to be making a threatening gesture across John/Mary's throat. The author uses this theory to advance his view that Leonardo da Vinci was once the head of a secret society, the Priory of Sion, which protects the secret of Jesus' royal bloodline, and the location of his modern descendants.

The fact is, however, that while damage makes it impossible to be sure of the figure's gender, it appears to be wearing male clothing. Although Mary could have been wearing male clothes, it is not highly probable. There are only 13 figures in the painting, so if one is Mary Magdalene, an apostle is missing: somebody would have noted a missing male apostle earlier. Some have suggested that on the front of the figure of Simon Peter there is one hand with a dagger which is associated to nobody in the picture, but in clearer reproductions this is seen to be Peter's right hand, resting against his hip with the palm turned outward; the knife points towards Bartholomew (far left) who was to be executed by being flayed. It may also indicate Peter's impulsive nature, as he cuts off a soldier's ear in John 18:10. A detailed preliminary drawing of the arm exists. Other paintings from that period (Castagno's 1447 and Ghirlandaio's 1480) also show John to be a very boyish or feminine looking figure with long fair hair. This was because John was supposed to have been the youngest and most unquestioningly devoted of the apostles. Hence he is often shown asleep against Jesus's shoulder. It was common in the period to show neophytes as very young or even feminine figures, as a way of showing their inferior position. This tradition continued well after the period, as the 19th century sculpture in Drogheda Cathedral, Ireland demonstrates. Not to mention that Leonardo also portrayed a male saint with similar effeminate features in his painting St. John the Baptist.

Leonardo da Vinci has been extensively investigated by Sigmund Freud. He took particular pleasure in this investigation, because he saw it as a stage in psychoanalysis's conquest of culture. "Biography, too, must become ours," he wrote to Jung on October 17, 1909, and added that "the riddle of Leonardo da Vinci's character has suddenly become transparent to me. That, then, would be the first step in biography." He took pleasure in writing about him, too, because he greatly admired Leonardo as one "among the greatest of the human race." Yet this admiration did not exempt Leonardo from psychoanalytic scrutinity. "There is no one so great," Freud wrote, "as to be disgraced by being subject to the laws which govern both normal and pathological activity with equal cogency." There were other, hidden, aspects to Freud's preoccupation with Leonardo: his study of this artist, whose homosexual inclinations he considered proved, came at a time when he was analyzing the residues of his own feelings for his former intimate friend Wilhelm Fliess. In any event, quite apart from this autobiographical source of Freud's interest in Leonardo's "case," his discussion of one way to homosexual object-choice remains of great interest.

What is known of Leonardo in this respect is little: but that little is full of significance. In an age which saw struggle between sensuality without restraint and gloomy asceticism, Leonardo represented the cool repudiation of sexuality -- a thing that would scarcely be expected of an artist and a portrayer of feminine beauty. His posthumous writings, which not only deal with the greatest scientific problems, but also contain trivialities that strike us as scarcely worthy of so great a mind (an allegorical natural history, animal fables, jokes, prophecies) are chaste -- one might even say abstinent -- to a degree that would cause surprise in a work of belle lettres even to day. So resolutely do they shun everything sexual that it would seem as if Eros alone, the preserver of all living things, was not worthy material for the investigator in his pursuit of knowledge. It is doubtful whether Leonardo ever embraced a woman in passion; nor is it known that he had any intimate mental relationship with a woman. While he was still an apprentice, living in the house of his master Verrocchio, a charge of forbidden homosexual practices was brought against him, along with some other young people, which ended in his acquittal. He seems to have fallen under the suspicion because he had employed a boy of bad reputation as a model. When he had become a Master, he surrounded himself with handsome boys and youths whom he took as pupils. The last of these pupils, Francesco Melzi, accompanied him to France, remained with him up to his death and was named by him as his heir.

Observation of men's daily lives shows us that most people succeed in directing very considerable portions of their sexual instinctual forces to their professional activity. The sexual instinct is particularly well fitted to make contributions of this kind since it is endowed with a capacity for sublimation: that is, it has the power to replace its immediate aim by other aims which may be valued more highly and which are not sexual. If we reflect on the concurrence in Leonardo of his overpowerful instinct for research and the atrophy of his sexual life (which was restricted to what is called ideal [sublimated] homosexuality) we shall be disposed to claim him as a model instance of sublimation instead of an irruption from the unconscious. The core of his nature, and the secret of it, would appear to be that after his curiosity had been activated in infancy in the service of sexual interests, he succeeded in sublimating the greater part of his libido into an urge for research.

The curiosity of small children is manifested in their untiring love of asking questions; this bewildering to the adult so long as he fails to understand that all these questions are merely circumlocutions and that they cannot come to an end because the child is only trying to make them take the place of a question which he does ask. When he grows bigger and becomes better informer this expression of curiosity often comes to a sudden end. Psychoanalytic investigation provides us with a full explanation of by teaching us that many, perhaps most children, or at least the most gifted ones, pass through a period, beginning when they are about 3, which may be called the period of infantile sexual researches. So far as we know, the curiosity of children of this age, does not awaken spontaneously; usually caused by the actual birth of a little brother or sister, or by a fear of it based on external experiences -- in which the child perceives a threat to his selfish interests. Researches are directed to the question of where babies come from, exactly as if the child were looking for ways and means to avert so undesired an event. In this way, we have been so astonished to learn that children refuse to believe the bits of information that are given to them -- for example, that they energetically reject the fable of the stork with its wealth of mythological meaning -- that they date their intellectual indipendence from this act of disbelief, and that they often feel in serious opposition to adults and in fact never afterwards forgive them for having deceived them here about the true facts of the case. They investigate along their own lines, divine the baby's presence inside the mother's body, etc. By that time they already have a notion of the sexual act, which appears to them to be something hostile and violent. But since their own sexual constitution has not yet reached the point of being able to produce babies, their investigation of where babies come from must inevitably come to nothing too and be abandoned as insoluble. The impression caused by this failure in the first attempt at intellectual indipendence appears to be of lasting and deeply depressing kind.

When the period of infantile sexual researches has been terminated by a wave of energitic sexual repression, the instinct for research has three distinct possible vicissitudes open to it owing to its early connection with sexual interests. In the first of these, research shares the fate of sexuality; thenceforward, curiosity remains inhibited and the free activity of intelligence may be limited for the whole of the subject's lietime, especially as shortly after this the powerful religious inhibition of thought is brought into play by education. This is the type characterized by neurotic inhibition. We know very well that the intellectual weakness which has been acquired in this way gives an effective impetus to the outbreak of a neurotic illness. In a second type the inhibited development is sufficiently strong to resist the sexual repression which has hold of it. Since time after the infantile sexual researches have come to an end, the intelligence, having grown stronger, recalls the old association and offers its help in evading sexual repression, and the suppresed sexual activities, in a distorted and unfree form, but sufficiently powerful to sexualize thinking itself and to color intellectual operations with the pleasure and anxiety that belong to sexual processes proper. Here investigation becomes sexual activity, often the exclusive one, and the feeling that comes from settling things, in one's mind and explaining them replaces sexual satisfaction; but the interminable character of the child's researches is also repeated in the fact that brooding never ends, and that the intellectual feeling, so much desired, of having found a solution recedes more and more into the distance.

In virtue of a special disposition, the third type, which is the rarest and the most perfect, escapes both inhibition of thought and neurotic compulsive thinking. It is true that here too sexual repression comes about, but it does not succeed in relegating a component instinct of sexual desire to the unconscious. Instead, the libido evades the fate of repression by being sublimated from the very beginning into curiosity and by becoming attached to the powerful instinct for research as a reinforcement. Here, too, the research becomes to some extent compulsive and a substitute for sexual activity; but owing to the complete difference in the underlying psychical processes (sublimation instead of an irruption from the unconscious) the quality of neurosis is absent; there is no attachment to the original complexes of infantile sexual research, and the instinct can operate freely in the service of intellectual interest. Sexual repression, which has made the instinct so strong through the addition to it of sublimated libido, is still taken into account by the inctinct, in that it avoids any concern with sexual themes.

In a passage about the flight of vultures Leonardo suddenly interrupts himself to pursue a memory from very early years which had sprung to his mind: 'It seems that I was always destined to be so deeply concerned with vultures; for I recall as one of my very earliest memories that while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips'. If we examine Leonardo's phantasy of the vulture, it does not appear strange for long. We seem to recall having come across the same sort of thing in many places, for example, in dreams; so that we may venture to translate the phantasy from its own special language into words that are generally understood. The translation is then seen to point to an erotic content. A tail, 'coda' is one of the most familiar symbols and substitutive expressions for the male organ (the d i c k), in Italian no less than in other languages; the situation in the phantasy, of a vulture opening the child's mouth and beating about inside it vigorously with its tail, corresponds to the idea of an act of fellatio, a sexual act in which the penis is put into the mouth of the person involved. It is strange that this phantasy is so completely passive in character; moreover it resembles certain dreams and phantasies found in women or passive homosexuals (who play the part of woman in sexual relations).

What the phantasy conceals is merely a reminiscence of suckling -- or being suckled -- at his mother's breast, a scene of human beauty that he, like so many artists, undertook to depict with his brush, in the guise of the mother of God and her child. There is indeed another point which we do not yet understand and which we must not lose sight of: this reminiscence, which has the same importance for both sexes, has been transformed by the man Leonardo into a passive homosexual phantasy. For the time being we shall put aside the question of what there may be to connect homosexuality with sucking at the mother's breast, merely recalling that tradition does not represent Leonardo as a man with homosexual feelings. In this connection, it is irrelevant to our purpose whether the charge brought against the young Leonardo was justified or not. What decides whether we describe someone as an invert is not his actual behavior, but his emotional attitude.

In Leonardo's case we believe that we know the real content of the phantasy: the replacement of his mother by the vulture indicates that the child was aware of his father's abscence and found himself alone with his mother. The fact of Leonardo's illegitimate birth is in harmony with his vulture phantasy; it was only on this account that he could compare himself to a vulture child. We now come up against the strange problem of why this content has been recast into a homosexual situation. The mother who suckles her child -- or to put it better, at whose breast the child sucks -- has been turned into a vulture that puts its tail into the child's mouth. We've asserted that, according to the usual way in which language makes use of substitutes, the vulture's 'coda' cannot possibly signify anything other than a male genital, a penis. But how imaginative activity can succeed in endowing precisely this bird which is a mother with the distinguishing mark of masculinity; and in view of this absurdity we appear to be at a loss how to reduce this creation of Leonardo's phantasy to any rational meaning.

Well, there was once a time when the male genital was found compatible with the picture of the mother. When a male child first turns his curiosity to the riddles of sexual life, he is dominated by his interest in his own genital. He finds that part of the body too valuable and too important for him to be able to believe that it could be missing in other people whom he feels he resembles so much. As he cannot guess that there exists another type of genital structure of equal worth, he is forced to make the assumption that all human beings, women as well as men, possess a penis like his own. This preconception is so firmly planted in the youthful investigator that it is not destroyed even when he first observes the genitals of little girls. His perception tells him, it is true, that there is something different from what there is in him, but he is incapable of admitting to himself that the content of this perception is that he cannot find a penis in girls. That the penis could be missing strikes him as an uncanny and intolerable idea, and so in an attempt at a compromise he comes to the conclusion that little girls have a penis as well, only it is still very small; it will grow later. If it seems from later observations that this expectation is not realized, he has another remedy at his disposal: little girls too had a penis, but it was cut off and in its place was left a wound. This theoretical advance already makes use of personal experiences of a distressing kind: the boy in the meantime has heard the threat that the organ which is so dear to him will be taken away from him if he shows his interest in it too plainly. Under the influence of this threat of castration he now sees the notion he has gained of the female genitals in a new light; henceforth he will tremble for his masculinity, but at the same time he will despise the unhappy creatures on whom the cruel punishment has, as he supposes, already fallen.

As mentioned above, the most striking feature of Leonardo's childhood phantasy is that it changed sucking at the mother's breast into being suckled, that is, into passivity, and thus into a situation whose nature is undoubtedly homosexual. When we remember historical probability of Leonardo having behaved in his life as one who was emotionally homosexual, the question is forced upon us whether this phantasy does not indicate the existence of a causal connection between Leonardo's relation with his mother in childhood and his later manifest, if ideal [sublimated] homosexuality. Homosexual men who had taken in Freud's time vigorous action against the restrictions imposed by law on their sexual activity, were fond of representing themselves, through their theoretical spokesmen, as a 'third sex'. They were, they claimed, men who were innately compelled by organic determinants to find pleasure in men, having been debarred from obtaining it in women. Much as one would be glad on grounds of humanity to endorse their claims, one would have to treat their theories with some reserve, for they have been advanced without regard for the psychical genesis of homosexuality. In all male homosexual cases the subjects had had a very intense erotic attachment to a female person, as a rule their mother, during the first period of childhood. Mothers of some homosexual persons are frequently masculine women, women with energetic traits of character, who were able to push the father out of his proper place. The same thing had been occassionally observed by Freud, but he was more strongly impressed by cases in which the father was absent from the beginning or left the scene at an early date, so that the boy found himself entirely under feminine influence. Indeed it almost seems as though the presence of a strong father would ensure that the son made the correct decision in his choice of object, namely someone of the opposite sex.

After this preliminary stage a transformation sets in whose mechanism is known to us but whose motive forces we do not yet understand. The child's love for his mother cannot continue to develop consciously any further; it succumbs to repression. The boy represses his love for his mother: he puts himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love. In this way he has become a homosexual. What he has done in fact is to slip back to auto-erotism: for the boys whom he now loves as grows up are after all only substitutive figures and revivals of himself in childhood -- boys whom he loves in the way in which his mother loved him when he was a child. He finds the objects of his love along the path of narcissism, as we say; for Narcissus, according to the Greek legend, was a youth who preferred his own reflection to everything else and who was changed into the lovely flower of that name.

Psychological considerations of a deeper kind justify the assertion that a man who has become a homosexual in this way remains unconsciously fixated to the mnemic image of his mother. By repressing his love for his mother he preserves it in his unconsciousness and from now on remains faithful to her. While he seems to pursue boys and be their lover, he is in reality running away from the other women, who might cause him to be unfaithful. In individual cases direct observation has also enabled us to show that the man who gives the appearance of being susceptible only to the charms of men is in fact attracted by women in the same way as other men; but on each occassion he hastens to transfer the excitation he has received from the woman on to a male object, and in this manner he repeats over and over again the mechanism by which he acquired his homosexuality. We are far from wishing to exaggerate the importance of these explanations of the psychical genesis of homosexuality. It is quite obvious that they are in sharp contrast to the official theories of those who spoke those days for homosexuals, but we know that they are not sufficiently comprehensive to make a conclusive explanation of the problem possible. What is for practical reasons called homosexuality may arise from a whole variety of psychosexual inhibitory processes; the particular process we have singled out is perhaps only one among many, and is perhaps related to only one type of 'homosexuality'. We must also admit that the number of cases of homosexual type in which it is possible to point to the determinants which we require far exceeeds the number of those where the deduced effect actually takes place; so that we too cannot reject the part played by unknown constitutional factors, to which the whole of homosexuality is usually traced.

Returning to the vulture phantasy now, we'd have to stress that in words which only too plainly recall a description of a sexual act ('and struck me many times with its tail against my lips'), Leonardo shows the intensity of the erotic relations between mother and child. From this linking of his mother's (the vulture's) activity with the prominence of the mouth zone it is not difficult to guess that a second memory is contained in the phantasy. This may be translated: 'My mother pressed innumerable passionate kisses on my mouth.' The phantasy is compounded from the memory of being suckled and being kissed by his mother.

As far as his father is concerned, Ser Piero da Vinci was a notary and descendant of notaries, a man of great energy who reached a position of esteem and prosperity. He was married four times. His first two wives died childless, and it was only his third wife who presented him with his first legitimate son, in 1476, by which time Leonardo had reached the age of 24 and had long ago exchanged his father's home for the studio of his master Verrocchio. By his fourth and last wife, whom he married when he was already in his fifties, he had nine more sons and two daughters. It cannot be doubted that his father too came to play an important part in Leonardo's psychosexual development, and not only negatively by his abscence during the boy's first childhood years, but also directly by his presence in the later part of Leonardo's childhood. No one who as a child desires his mother can escape wanting to put himself in his father's place, can fail to identify himself with him in his imagination, and later to make it his task in life to gain ascendancy over him. When Leonardo was received into his grandfather's house before he had reached the age of 5, his young step-mother Albiera must certainly have taken his mother's place where his feelings were concerned, and he must have found himself in what way he called the normal relationship of rivalry with his father. As we know, a decision in favor of homosexuality only takes place round about the years of puberty. When this decision had been arrived at in Leonardo's case, his identification with his father lost all significance for his sexual life, but it nevertheless continued in other spheres of non-erotic activity. We hear that he was fond of magnificence and fine clothes, and kept servants and horses, although, in Vasari's words 'he possessed almost nothing and did little work'. The responsibility for these tastes is not to be attributed solely to his feeling for beauty: we recognize in them at the same time a compulsion to copy and to outdo his father.

If his imitation of his father did him damage as an artist, his rebellion against his father was the infantile determinant of what was perhaps an equally sublime achievement in the field of scientific research. He dared to utter the bold assertion which contains within itself the justification for all independent research: 'He who appeals to authority when there is a difference of opinion works with his memory rather than with his reason'. Thus he became the first modern natural scientist, and an abundance of discoveries and suggestive ideas rewarded his courage for being the first man since the time of Greeks to probe the secrets of nature while relying solely on observation and his own judgement. But in teaching that authority should be looked down on and that imitation of the 'ancients' should be repudiated, and in constantly urging that the study of nature was the source of all truth, he was merely repeating -- in the highest sublimation attainable by man -- the one-sided point of view which had already forced itself on the little boy as he gazed in wonder on the world. If we translate scientific abstraction back again into concrete individual experience, we see that the 'ancients' and authority simply correspond to his father, and nature once more becomes the tender and kindly mother who had nourished him. In most other human beings -- no less to-day than in primaeval times -- the need for support from an authority of some sort is so compelling that their world begins to totter if that authority is threatened. Only Leonardo could dispense with that support; he would not have been able to do so had he not learned in the first years of his life to do without his father. His later scientific research, with all its boldness and indipendence, presupposed the existence of infantile sexual researches uninhibited by his father, and was a prolongation of them with the sexual element excluded.

When anyone has, like Leonardo, escaped being initimidated by his father during his earliest childhood, and has in his researches cast away the fetters of authority, it would be in the sharpest contradiction to our expectation if we found that he had remained a believer and had been unable to escape from dogmatic religion. Psychoanalysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the father-complex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father, and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose religious beliefs as soon as their father's authority breaks down. It does not seem as if the instance of Leonardo could show this view of religious belief to be mistaken. Accusations charging him with unbelief or (what at that time came to the same thing) with apostasy from Christianity were brought against him while he was still alive.

In Leonardo's case, as in the development of the mental life of children, the first researches of childhood were concerned with the problems of sexuality. Indeed he himself gives this away in a transparent disguise by connecting his urge for research with the vulture phantasy, and by singling out the problem of the flight of birds as one to which, as the result of a special chain of circumstances, he was destined to turn his attention. A highly obscure passage in his notes which is concerned with the flight of birds, and which sounds like a prophecy, gives a very good demonstration of the degree of affective interest with which he clung to his wish to succeed in imitating the art of flying himself: 'The great bird will take its first flight from the back of its Great Swan; it will fill the universe with stupefaction, and all writings with renown, and be the eternal glory of the nest where it was born'. He probably hoped that he himself would be able to fly one day, and we know from wish-fulfilling dreams what bliss is expected from the fulfillment of that hope. But why do so many people dream of being able to fly?

The answer is that to fly or to be a bird is only a disguise for another wish, and that more than one bridge, involving words or things, leads us to recognize what it is. When we consider that inquisitive children are told that babies are brought by a large bird, such as the stork; when we find that the ancient represented the phallus as having wings; that the commonest expression in German for male sexual activity is 'vögeln' ['to bird': 'vögel' is the German for 'bird']; that the male organ is actually called 'l'uccello' ['the bird'] in Italian -- all of these are only small fragments from a whole mass of connected ideas, from which we learn that in dreams the wish to be able to fly is to be understood as nothing else than a longing to be capable of sexual performance. This is an early infantile wish. When an adult recalls his childhood it seems to him to have been a happy time, in which one enjoyed the moment and looked to the future without any wishes; it is for this reason that he envies children. But if children themselves were able to give us information earlier they would probably tell a different story. It seems that childhood is not the blissful idyll into which we distort it in retrospect, and that, on the contrary, children are goaded on through the years of childhood by the one wish to get big and do what grown-ups do. This wish is the motive of all their games. Whenever children feel in the course of their sexual researches that in the province which is so mysterious but nevertheless so important there is something wonderful of which adults are capable but they are forbidden to know of and do, they are filled with a violent wish to be able to do it, and they dream of it in the form of flying, or they prepare this disguise of their wish to be used in their later flying dreams. Thus, aviation, too, has its infantile erotic roots.

Here, was one problem at least which has escaped the repression that later estranged him from sexuality. With slight changes in meaning, the same subject continued to interest him from his years of childhood until the time of his most complete intellectual maturity; and it may well be that the skill that he desired was no more attainable by him in his primary sexual sense than in its mechanical one, and that he remained frustrated in both wishes. Indeed, the great Leonardo remained like a child for the whole of his life in more than one way; it is said that all great men are bound to retain some infantile part. Even as an adult he continued to play, and this was another reason why he often appeared uncanny and incomprehensible to his contemporaries. It is only us who are unsatisfied that he would construct the most elaborate mechanical toys for court festivities and ceremonial receptions, for we are reluctant to see the artist turning his power to such trifles. He himself seems to have shown no unwillingness to spend his time thus.

Leonardo himself, with his love of truth and his thirst for knowledge, would not have discouraged an attempt on the part of anyone to take the trivial pecularities and riddles in his nature as a starting-point, for discovering what determined his mental and intellectual development. We do homage to him by learning from him. It does not detract from his greatness if we make a study of the sacrifices which his development from childhood must have entailed, and if we bring together the factors which have stamped him with the tragic mark of failure. We must expressly insist that we have never reckoned Leonardo as a neurotic or a 'nerve case', as the awkward phrase goes. Anyone who protests at our so much as daring to examine him in the light of discoveries gained in the field of pathology is still clinging to prejudices which we have to-day rightly abandoned. We no longer think that health and illness, normal and neurotic people, are to be sharply distinguished from each other, and that neurotic traits must necessarily be taken as proofs of general inferiority. To-day we know that neurotic symptoms are structures which are substitutes for our development from a child to a civilized human being. We know too that we all produce such substitutive structures, and that it is only their number, intensity and distribution which justify us in using the practical concept of illness and in inferring the presence of constitutional inferiority. From the slight indications we have about Leonardo's personality we should be inclined to place him close to the type of neurotic that we describe as 'obsessional', and we may compare his researches to the 'obsessive brooding' of neurotics, and his inhibitions to what are known as their 'abulias'.

das Geviert, innocent as Leonardo's vulture phantasy is, I bet the poor man would have never ever written it, had he known a paranoid individual like Sigmund Freud would make such a big deal out of it!!!

Leonardo da Vinci has been extensively investigated by Sigmund Freud. He took particular pleasure in this investigation, because he saw it as a stage in psychoanalysis's conquest of culture. "Biography, too, must become ours," he wrote to Jung on October 17, 1909, and added that "the riddle of Leonardo da Vinci's character has suddenly become transparent to me. That, then, would be the first step in biography." He took pleasure in writing about him, too, because he greatly admired Leonardo as one "among the greatest of the human race." Yet this admiration did not exempt Leonardo from psychoanalytic scrutinity. "There is no one so great," Freud wrote, "as to be disgraced by being subject to the laws which govern both normal and pathological activity with equal cogency." There were other, hidden, aspects to Freud's preoccupation with Leonardo: his study of this artist, whose homosexual inclinations he considered proved, came at a time when he was analyzing the residues of his own feelings for his former intimate friend Wilhelm Fliess. In any event, quite apart from this autobiographical source of Freud's interest in Leonardo's "case," his discussion of one way to homosexual object-choice remains of great interest.

Freud penned the study on Leonardo Da Vinci and his homosexuality, projecting a bit his own homosexuality onto Leonardo. Freud's basic suggestion was that much of Leonardo's artistic and scientific activity actually had an unconscious defensive meaning, to protect him from learning about his own internal self. Now before everyone reaches for the pinch of salt, young Leonardo was acquitted of sodomy of a notorious male prostitute in 1476, but only got off through lack of evidence. Many of his works, like the Bacchus and the St. John, show examples of bisexuality, being peculiarly androgynous males. Furthermore Leonardo's drawings of the external female genitalia are inaccurate, and are of a form which have led many to suggest they were taken from a cadaver, or that they were made under pressure of aversion or anxiety. In his drawings of nude females, such as the studies of Leda and the Swan, the crotch appears smooth and imperforate, a mere extension of the mons Veneris. Most of his drawings of sexual intercourse are of the couple in a standing position facing each other - an unusual posture to pick for anyone personally familiar with the heterosexual act.

Perhaps Freud himself identified strongly with Leonardo, because of anxiety over his own homosexual impulses and his admiration of Leonardo's ability to sublimate them into non-sexual activities. After all Freud had problems with his own sexuality. His marriage was a profound disappointment sexually and emotionally. He seems to have terminated sexual relations with his wife at the age of 40. Yet while his sex life was coming to a halt, around 1895, he was also entering a hugely creative period of writing. It was precisely during this period that he developed the concept of sublimation - the transformation of sexual energy into culturally creative acts. One of the lessons of Freud and Leonardo is that it sometimes takes a genius to really understand another. For example in the case of Freud and Leonardo, Freud started by trying to understand why Leonardo tended to leave work unfinished, which was actually a problem for Freud himself. One of Freud's legacies is to leave us wondering if Leonardo, like other geniuses, could have gone on to conquer the personality difficulties which impeded further development of his ideas, whether flight may not have been perfected in the 15th-century.

And here it is an article on the connection between Freud's cocaine habit and his homosexual tendencies:

And here it is an article on the connection between Freud's cocaine habit and his homosexual tendencies:

http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/cocaine

There is a certain interest in the cocaine episode in Freud's life. The explanation lies in that cocaine belongs to the group of prohibited substances today and sensation mongers imagine Freud's association with cocaine might reveal outrageous private secrets! People imagine that the presence of a cocaine episode in Freud's life could be an indication of a drug addicted Freud. On the other hand, the need to demolish great personalities with a decisive influence on Western culture seems to be irresistible. Hence the careful pursuit for biographical details that might prove an active support to this odd need. Freud's relationship with cocaine nevertheless does not satisfy either spicy biographical details mongers or slanderers. The truth is that Freud was a cocaine user indeed. Only that cocaine was not prohibited during his time, but prescribed and used as an euphoric. The harmful side of the substance had not been discovered yet. The fact that famous beverages such Coca-Cola contained coke extract is quite telling! Cocaine addiction and its harmful effects were only discovered later.

You have this poverty-stricken 28-year-old Freud suffering from depression, chronic fatigue, and other neurotic symptoms. "I have been reading about cocaine, the essential constituent of coca leaves, which some Indian tribes chew to enable them to resist privations and hardships," Freud wrote to his fiancée Martha on April 21, 1884. "I am procuring some myself and will try it with cases of heart disease and also of nervous exhaustion..." He used cocaine as a stimulus, something to help him manage his depression, achieve a state of well being, and relax under tense circumstances. Freud even sent some of his precious cocaine to Martha, "to make her strong and give her cheeks a red color." Indeed he pressed it on his friends and colleagues, both for themselves and their patients; he gave it to his sisters. In short, looked at from the vantage point of our present knowledge, he was rapidly becoming a public menace.

Cocaine also had medical advantages for Freud. He started his research in this field concerning the impact of cocaine on medicine, on minor surgery to be more precise. This is what he himself tells us about his endeavor: "In 1884, a side but deep interest" - Freud mentioned in his biography - "made me have the Merck company supply me with an alkaloid quite little known at the time, to study its physiological effects. While engrossed in this research, the opportunity for me then occurred to make a trip to see my fiancée, whom I had not seen for almost 2 years. I then quickly completed my investigation on cocaine and, in the short text I published, I included the notice that other uses of the substance will soon be revealed too. At the same time, I made an insistent recommendation to my friend L. Konigstein, an eye doctor, to check on the extent to which the anesthetic qualities of cocaine might also be used with sore eyes. On my return, I found that it was not him but another friend of mine, Carl Koller (now in New York), who, after hearing me talking about cocaine, had in fact made the decisive experiments on animals' eyes and had presented his findings at the Ophthalmology Congress in Heidelberg. That is why Koller has been rightfully considered as the discoverer of cocaine-based local anesthesia, which has become so important in minor surgery..."

The fact that Freud had so closely missed scientific celebrity with the publication of his findings about cocaine cannot shroud a tragic event he does not mention in his biography. His research of cocaine effects was also due to a personal reason. He hoped cocaine might help his friend von Fleischl-Marxow, who had become a morphine addict, as result of attempts to soothe the pains inflicted on him by an infection. Nevertheless, his friend's cocaine prescriptions proved fatal. "If only it had soothed his pain", Freud would exclaim in 1885. On the contrary, Fleischl-Marxow died a slow, painful death and the alleged remedy had done nothing but increase his suffering. He had become a cocaine addict, in the same way he had been a morphine addict, and ended in using very large quantities thereof.

Yet while his sex life was coming to a halt, around 1895, he was also entering a hugely creative period of writing. It was precisely during this period that he developed the concept of sublimation - the transformation of sexual energy into culturally creative acts.

Actually, Freud went a bit further with this idea of sublimation. Not only is sublimation re-direction of impulses from an object (or target) that is sexual to one that is social in character (e.g., masturbation becoming too threatening to a young child, prompting him to horse-back ride), but transformation into a more socially sanctioned form of sadistic aggressive impulses too threatening to self-acceptance is also sublimation. For instance, blocked by external prohibitions or internalized inhibitions (producing conflict/anxiety) the latter impulses may be displaced to interest in Surgery.

The underlying rationale in these assertions was the idea that there was a finite amount of energy contained in the person. This energy that Freud called libido is "cathected" (attached or fixed) on aspects of the internal and external environment. The energy available to the organism may be continuosly transformed, fixed onto different "objects" (Freud meant by "objects" people as well, not just inanimate things). However the total amount of energy is conserved and stable -- Freud's system was thus consistent with the hydraulic models of the 19th-century physics. The Id (Es) was seen as a kind of dynamo, and the total mind (psyche) was viewed as a closed system motivated to maintain equilibrium: Any forces that were built up required discharge. The discharge could be indirect. Instinctual impulses could be displaced from one object to another, for instance, from one's parents to other authority figures or more remotely, from the genitals, e.g., to phallic symbols.

And here it is an article on the connection between Freud's cocaine habit and his homosexual tendencies:

http://www.historyhouse.com/in_history/cocaine

There is a certain interest in the cocaine episode in Freud's life. The explanation lies in that cocaine belongs to the group of prohibited substances today and sensation mongers imagine Freud's association with cocaine might reveal outrageous private secrets! People imagine that the presence of a cocaine episode in Freud's life could be an indication of a drug addicted Freud. On the other hand, the need to demolish great personalities with a decisive influence on Western culture seems to be irresistible. Hence the careful pursuit for biographical details that might prove an active support to this odd need. Freud's relationship with cocaine nevertheless does not satisfy either spicy biographical details mongers or slanderers. The truth is that Freud was a cocaine user indeed. Only that cocaine was not prohibited during his time, but prescribed and used as an euphoric. The harmful side of the substance had not been discovered yet. The fact that famous beverages such Coca-Cola contained coke extract is quite telling! Cocaine addiction and its harmful effects were only discovered later.

You have this poverty-stricken 28-year-old Freud suffering from depression, chronic fatigue, and other neurotic symptoms. "I have been reading about cocaine, the essential constituent of coca leaves, which some Indian tribes chew to enable them to resist privations and hardships," Freud wrote to his fiancée Martha on April 21, 1884. "I am procuring some myself and will try it with cases of heart disease and also of nervous exhaustion..." He used cocaine as a stimulus, something to help him manage his depression, achieve a state of well being, and relax under tense circumstances. Freud even sent some of his precious cocaine to Martha, "to make her strong and give her cheeks a red color." Indeed he pressed it on his friends and colleagues, both for themselves and their patients; he gave it to his sisters. In short, looked at from the vantage point of our present knowledge, he was rapidly becoming a public menace.

Cocaine also had medical advantages for Freud. He started his research in this field concerning the impact of cocaine on medicine, on minor surgery to be more precise. This is what he himself tells us about his endeavor: "In 1884, a side but deep interest" - Freud mentioned in his biography - "made me have the Merck company supply me with an alkaloid quite little known at the time, to study its physiological effects. While engrossed in this research, the opportunity for me then occurred to make a trip to see my fiancée, whom I had not seen for almost 2 years. I then quickly completed my investigation on cocaine and, in the short text I published, I included the notice that other uses of the substance will soon be revealed too. At the same time, I made an insistent recommendation to my friend L. Konigstein, an eye doctor, to check on the extent to which the anesthetic qualities of cocaine might also be used with sore eyes. On my return, I found that it was not him but another friend of mine, Carl Koller (now in New York), who, after hearing me talking about cocaine, had in fact made the decisive experiments on animals' eyes and had presented his findings at the Ophthalmology Congress in Heidelberg. That is why Koller has been rightfully considered as the discoverer of cocaine-based local anesthesia, which has become so important in minor surgery..."

The fact that Freud had so closely missed scientific celebrity with the publication of his findings about cocaine cannot shroud a tragic event he does not mention in his biography. His research of cocaine effects was also due to a personal reason. He hoped cocaine might help his friend von Fleischl-Marxow, who had become a morphine addict, as result of attempts to soothe the pains inflicted on him by an infection. Nevertheless, his friend's cocaine prescriptions proved fatal. "If only it had soothed his pain", Freud would exclaim in 1885. On the contrary, Fleischl-Marxow died a slow, painful death and the alleged remedy had done nothing but increase his suffering. He had become a cocaine addict, in the same way he had been a morphine addict, and ended in using very large quantities thereof.

Cocaine is not to be portrayed as a reinforcer of compulsive behaviour as it is often presented from the perspective of pathology. In contrast, one has to make room for the perspective of the majority of users in which it often appears as one of the hedonistic entities of everyday life. The importance of taking drug related pleasure as a research topic can be illustrated by the serious attempt to understand controlled drug use.

For example most cocaine users do not lose control. Apparently some "control mechanisms" exist and they are not restricted to cocaine. This conclusion has been reached by a growing number of drug researchers. A full understanding of control mechanisms is still lacking as well as a a thorough theoretical investigation of this concept itself. But, assuming the validity of such a concept, one of the regulators of drug use might very well be a relative change in drug related pleasure when drug use exceeds certain limits. A cocaine study has showed for instance that when a level of use of 2.5 grams of cocaine per week is exceeded, the number of reported unpleasant negative effects rises steeply. This could very well be one of the explanations of why levels above 2.5 gram per week are so rarely maintained over longer periods in experienced cocaine users, even though many respondents are very well able to financially support such levels of use.

In many psychological and sociological views on drug use both the concepts of drug related pleasure and controlled use are of little or no importance. Heroin and cocaine allegedly cannot be used in a controlled and pleasurable manner because the concepts of control and pleasure conflict with ruling notions. Loss of control and extreme misery is what the use of these drugs will yield. Empirical verification from an epidemiological point of view of such ex cathedra notions is still rare.

If one realizes that much of our knowledge about the use of cocaine has come from studies done by clinicians, one also comes to realize that there is a sampling bias with the data that clinicians use in their generalizations. This problem is similar to the problem one would have if our knowledge about the use of alcohol would be derived solely by the knowledge gathered by clinicians working in alcohol treatment. Alcohol users not seen by these medical professionals of course do exist and are indeed the great majority of the users of alcohol.

vienna, in a society that's addicted to identifying addictions, some -- "Internet addiction," for instance -- are obvious targets for valid criticism. But identifying drug addiction as a choice? It seems ridiculous, even blasphemous; isn't it scientific fact that drug addiction is an involuntary medical disease? According to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, it is: "Chronic, hardcore drug use is a disease, and anyone suffering from a disease needs treatment." Drug addiction is not a disease. Instead, it's a scapegoated behavior that has been incorrectly identified as a physical or mental illness, a victim of bad science and misguided policy. Like homosexuality, masturbation and other behaviors once thought to be physical or mental illnesses -- the idea that drug addiction is an uncontrollable affliction can and should be swiftly discredited.

If addiction is a choice, what is it not? It is not a disease. And it is not involuntary. And it is not a thing that causes people to engage in certain behaviors. The conventional wisdom is that the availability of drugs causes people to use them. That's one of the big arguments that is used to support the war on people=the war on drugs. And the conventional wisdom is also that if you use "addicting drugs," you will not be able to moderate your use of those drugs [or] stop using those drugs. The conventional wisdom is that there is some power in the drug that makes people keep using the drug. Another part of that argument is that once you use the drug, something changes in your body. And that change -- which has never been identified, only hypothesized -- causes you to keep using the drug.

Yet, people use drugs as a way of avoiding and coping with certain existential experiences. They don't want to do what is necessary to change their experience. I'm not saying that's not difficult -- it can be very difficult. For example, Native Americans -- who are the victims of literal and metaphorical genocide -- have major problems they have to contend with; I'm not saying that those are small by any means. But instead of doing what they need to do to change their experience, they may tend to rely on drugs as a way of making themselves feel better so they don't have to cope with those problems. Don't drugs have significant physiological effects on people? Yes, and this is a point that serves as a red herring for people who maintain that drugs are dangerous. There are two ways of looking at this. We can say, "Do drugs have a certain effect on the body?" Of course they do, and the people on my side who go against the grain [admit that]. However, drug use and addiction doesn't have to do with what drugs do to the body, but how drugs get into the body. If you take a drug like cocaine, obviously something changes in your body. Every time you think any thought, your body changes. There's always a physiological change associated with whatever you do. Now the question is, "Does that physiological change make you do what you're doing, or do you choose to do that?" If you have epilepsy, and you have a seizure, of course there's a physical change in your body that makes you go into convulsions. I'm not saying that you have a choice as to whether you convulse or not -- that's clearly not a volitional act. But whether you're going to reach for another cigarette or not is a volitional act; it's not the same thing as an epileptic seizure.

There's lots of evidence that shows that people who have been "addicted" to heroin for a long time give up heroin once their environments change. The act and the behavior of using or consuming a drug -- regardless of what it is -- is a choice, and people engage in those kinds of behaviors for reasons. There isn't some power in the drug or in their physiology that causes them to do it. Because by that reasoning, if people committed crimes while they were on drugs, then we'd have to exculpate them; we'd have to say they weren't responsible for their behavior because they were under the influence of drugs, and that isn't the way the law works. People have always had an investment in scapegoating some group or thing as a way of easing their existential anxiety and as a way of boosting their self-esteem. So to persecute people for using illegal drugs is like persecuting any minority -- blacks, Jews or gays -- because they've been blamed for the problems that the majority experiences. People have always done it; they'll always do it. What's different is that, in the past, people had a clearer sense that they were scapegoating blacks, or scapegoating Jews, or scapegoating homosexuals for their problems. But today, under this charade of science and medicine, we're "not" scapegoating drug users and addictions for our problems -- we're instilling public health. I think that it's human nature to try to find some blame as a way of easing anxiety. If people don't look to religion, then they look to persecute a minority or a substance. Who benefits from persecuting people for being addicts or who benefits from persecuting illegal drug users? I think it's clear: The drug enforcement agents benefit because they earn a living doing that. Politicians benefit because they look like they're getting rid of or getting a control on evil in our society. But I think there's a subtle group that people don't really want to pay attention to -- those who build prisons to house lots of people for consensual crimes. Of course, the others that have a deep ideological and economic investment in the "disease model" of addiction are the treatment providers because they make money treating a mythical disease.

Alcoholics Anonymous. What a cult, a religion! Well, AA should be free to exist just the way any religious group should be free to exist. My concern is that it has become a tool of the state. The state arrests people for drunk driving and orders them into Alcoholics Anonymous. That to me is a violation of the First Amendment, and the separation of church and state. I'm all for people who want to go to AA. I think it's great -- they should be able to go to any group just like they should be able to go any church, synagogue or Islamic temple. What I object to is people are being misled that AA has the truth about addiction, which is absolutely false. It would be like saying that Judaism has the truth about addiction or Christianity does or Catholicism does. What concerns me about what AA teaches is that it goes against scientific research that has focused on the concept known as self-efficacy. That is, if you believe you can do something, you're more likely to try to do it. What AA and similar disease-model groups say is that you can't control your behavior; you can't control your addiction. I think what we should be doing is teaching people that they can control their addiction. It's a choice. And then they're more likely to prove that to be true. And that idea has really been supported by psychological research; the AA idea has not.

People have the right to destroy themselves, as upsetting as that may be. That doesn't mean that private groups -- myself included -- might not try to talk these people into getting some help or talk them out of destroying themselves. But ultimately the choice rests with the individual, and I don't think we are ever justified in a civilized society that values freedom in coercing people into any kind of program, whether it's called treatment or conversation or psychotherapy, against the person's will. I think that people should be held responsible for any harm that they do to anyone else, and I don't think that we should excuse them because they're using drugs. One of the problems we get into here is what constitutes harm? It gets kind of fuzzy. If you engage in a behavior that upsets me, is that harm? You have a right to engage in behaviors of your choice as long as you don't infringe upon my freedom. I think the libertarian dictum that one should be free to do whatever one wants as long as it's not at the expense of someone else is one we should abide by. My right to swing my fist ends precisely at my neighbor's nose; whether I'm using drugs or alcohol is essentially irrelevant. If some family member or friend is self-destructing using drugs, does that cause you harm? It causes you psychological and emotional harm, it's upsetting to you. But is that the same thing as some kind of criminal act? I don't think it is. That's part of the price we have to pay in a free society.

I don't think drugs should be legalized -- I think we should repeal, in total, drug prohibition. "Legalize" connotates government regulation, and I think that people have a right to drugs as property as guaranteed by the constitution. I don't think they should have a right to marijuana, for example, because it qualifies as medicine -- certainly, they should be able to use the drugs for any purposes that they want, whether it's medical or recreational.

Much medical and social science when applied to drugs seem to be unable to describe and explain the phenomenon of drug use without an unusually strong bias. This bias is produced by a cultural dependency on concepts of much larger significance than drug use itself. As a result the object is almost completely blurred from view. One could not help but seeing much of what happened around oneself in the drug arena as "social constructions", realities created by a myriad of relationships between persons who used concepts to understand a reality that would adapt them for their survival within these relationships. And since the inequality of power is one of the structural characteristics of interpersonal (or for that matter, inter-organisational) relationships, much of the so called scientific analysis of drug use would tend to be most instrumental to the survival of the most powerful. Power, of course, is not only connected to wealth or decision making, but also to the construction of morality and ideology.

Science is one of the fundamental instruments of political and ideological conflicts. The determination of which branches and concepts of science will be developed or applied is dependent upon economic and political power. Because power cannot be evenly distributed in a community those in power will develop science according to their interests and taste. One should not look upon this as dishonesty or exploitation per se, but in most cases, as honourable and quite inescapable. The concepts used to attain a detailed understanding of the relation between concepts and power were the "I", the "Ego", and the "individual". The social psychologist for example, would critically investigate many psychological and sociological theories in order to come to grips with the use of social science for the conceptual construction of the "ego" and "the individual". To summarize, in present Western society, dominated as it is by entrepreneurial activity, persons have to very often find their way against or without others. Therefore, generally a person will learn to "experience himself alone, in the centre of things for whom everything else exists outside himself, separated by an invisible wall from him, assuming as self evident that other individuals experience the same". This specific historical construction of the individual, of course, is not the intentional product of some office or ideologue, but a by-product of people in their mutual and socially structured relationships. It goes unnoticed, like breathing. In this way psychiatry, psychology and sociology are tools of a class of people who interpret, influence and try to shape others and society from this dominant perspective on the individual.

One must simply not take seriously the reasons for the use of drugs that are often mentioned in scientific literature. It's more efficient to look for motives behind the words, and search for these motives in the field of power inequalities. One discovers that the so called "reasons" why people take drugs are convenient conceptual constructions that are fitted to a predetermined, mostly psychopathological model of explanation of drug use and "dependence". However, it might very well have been the emergence of a new class of professional medical men at the end of the last century that helped to socially define illegal (often so called "non-medical") drug use. Professionals related to the maintenance of physical or mental health and the management of pain have throughout history been very powerful people. The tools and concepts of these professionals may change in history. The modern power to mediate between (a large majority of) drugs and the use of drugs is a new and tremendously important instrument. In contemporary Western society drug use is not left to the individual responsibility of the consumer. It is assumed that the consumer is not able to exercise this responsibility. Every consumer of drugs is therefore forced to first consult a "drug broker", which produces in turn an almost total monopoly of the drug broker class. Total prohibition of certain drugs is the focal point of the assumption that drugs should be excluded from the realm of consumer freedom. In this sense the existence of "illegal" or "non medical" drug use is a vital concept for present day legitimizations of medical power. This particular concept has been internalized by all categories of the public, although it has been attacked by theoreticians such as Szasz. And as long as the definition of "illegal drug use" helps medical professionals to retain their power, a large majority of them can be expected to hold to it.

Power also plays a role in the management of minorities. Management of minorities does not only relate to the opportunities of economic exploitation, but also applies to the warding off of fear. If mainstream groups develop fear of minorities for whatever reason, there is a small likelihood that scientists belonging to these mainstream groups will not share these fears. Science can then be used to translate popular and crude verbalisations into an "objective" scientific discourse of warding off policies that legitimate the use of physical force against the feared minorities. One of the most common legitimizations of the use of physical force is the redefinition of drug use as crime or "crime generating". Once this has been accomplished the social institutions that will care for drug users can be defined as the police, prison personnel or, in extreme cases, the army. The redefinition of illegal drug use as pathology is on first view completely different from its redefinition as crime. The difference, however, is mainly in the selection of control institutions. The violence of health institutions towards the users of illegal drugs is often less outspoken than the violence of criminal justice institutions. This is a difference that can be very important for individuals that are subject to this violence. But both medicalization and criminalization are techniques to control defined deviant groups and in this sense they are identical.

For example, it is to be concluded that the conventional combinations of behavior we define as heroin dependence are mainly a product of society's reactions toward a frequent heroin user, not of the effects of heroin itself. We are so conditioned by medicine to think in terms of the pharmacological effects of a substance that drug-use related behaviours are automatically associated with the substance. But the effects of a substance are almost always mediated by the user and the social context in which use takes place. A failure to understand this interaction gives rise to an invalid emphasis on the pharmacological dimension. This distorted emphasis is often connected to narrowly conceived psychiatric models of explanation. Investigation of the concept of addiction itself, as an expression of "central cultural conceptions about motivation and behaviour" would have been a logical extension of this reasoning. Conceptually shifting away from the incorrigible association between frequent use of illegal drugs and pathology, a drug use career with all its secondary social effects can be researched in a completely different way. Once on this road (coupled with the view of the instrumental function of science for drug political status quo) one quickly recognizes "realities" that have been excluded as an object of scientific inquiry. A good example is the pleasure that drugs provide. Drug-related pleasure or other non-negative functions of drug use cannot be easily investigated within a political structure that is committed to the prohibition of drugs as a defense against evil. Imagine a high officer of the Inquisition in the late Middle Ages allowing for the possibility that a large proportion of heretics were "non evil"! This would have been impossible.

Thus, in conclusion it can be observed that the specific ways in which psychology and sociology have looked upon drug use and selected topics for research are often purely instrumental in not endangering the existence of the a priori's of the present "drug problem". On the other hand, both disciplines yield notions that enable us to clarify and identify this instrumentalism. Where an individual scientist will stand might be a matter of chance, but most probably it is a result of his attachment to conventional perspectives and prejudice on drug use or drug dependence. And the chances for developing a non-conventional scientific outlook on illegal drugs become slimmer as financial support for drug research is regulated by drug policy institutions whose aim is to support conventional drug politics. This works also the other way round. No doubt this way to look upon matters of drugs can be very much influenced by the simple circumstance of living somewhere where drug policy is deviant when seen from a global perspective. Finally, let's accept that a neutral view on drugs is highly improbable in a world that translates the drug issue in war metaphors. One has to be convinced that only the abolition of drug prohibition might ultimately create the conditions for a maximum of independent scientific involvement in the issue.

Greta post, defina! Here it is another intriguing article from Peter Cohen:

The psychological a-priori in scientific discussions of addiction to heroin, as well as addiction to other substances, consists of two separate assumptions:

that becoming addicted is best described as a psychological process within a particular individual, and that such a description can also serve as the basis for its explanation;

that addiction is a psychopathological phenomenon within an individual which necessitates change and that the description in psychological terms serves as the basis for a therapeutic intervention.

Logically, 1 and 2 do not go together. But in everyday practice they are inseparable. In this article, which deals mainly with heroin addiction, both are taken as equally important. However, from the addict's point of view and certainly in our own dealings with the so called heroin problem, the idea that every regular heroin user, let alone every addict, is a pathological case is especially important. Several 'theories' are used to label addictions as a pathological aberration. I will indicate four of them, but undoubtedly more could be found in the vast literature on this subject.

Within psychoanalysis this vision is paramount. Addictions are either based on an oral fixation1 or on an anal one, or even on both. In this reasoning the actual addiction is a regression which has to be dealt with by removing the regression. This idea has remained almost undisputed within psychoanalysis even though it has long been known that addiction is extremely hard to 'cure' by psycho analytical methods.

B. Addiction is pathological "because it is characterized by an abnormally high intensity of craving for satisfaction and by a strikingly low susceptibility for modification of the need for that satisfaction."

This way of describing addiction makes quantity rather than quality the basis of the pathology. One might remark here, that this type of description could easily encompass many behaviours which we do not normally consider pathological (for example, ambition, sex or the need for company).

C. Addiction is pathological because of the function it fulfils within some pathological syndrome.

For instance Kuiper says that not only affective problems, but also other illnesses can lead to addiction. Thus for Kuiper emotional inhibitions can provide the motivation underlying addiction to disinhibitors like alcohol or stimulants; depression or dysphoria can give rise to addiction to alcohol or opiates; anxiety can lead to addiction to alcohol, opiates or hypnotics; and tension, depersonalization and derealization can result in addiction to substances that counteract these affects. Chronic depersonalization and emotional emptiness give rise to chronic use of cannabis. Here the addiction is functional within a pathology, and thereby becomes pathological itself. It is a secondary pathology.7

Authors like Mijolla and Shentoub fall into this category. For them addiction is a symptom of the impossibility of enacting satisfactory object relations. The addictive substance replaces the human object, and the relation to the substance replaces a relation to the human object.

D. Although the following theory of the pathology of addiction is similar to that given by Mijolla and Shentoub, I present it separately because of its rigour. For Kohut, some cases of addiction occur because people do not have sufficient psychological structure "to soothe themselves or to go to sleep". Later he states, in a generalizing context, that "the addict craves the drug because the drug seems to be capable of curing the central defect in his self". This looks like pathology in extremis. Kohut's view could also have been considered under the first heading, in which addiction is seen as a developmental disorder.

This short and certainly incomplete excursion through the theories which define addiction as pathological behaviour on the basis of a psychological understanding of the phenomenon, leaves us with a strong sense of disquiet. If we are to believe the quoted authors, there is a lot wrong with addicted people.

But strangely enough, authors can be found who describe addiction as pathological without linking it to specific qualitative or quantitative characteristics. I should mention Van Dijk, who concludes with regard to alcohol addiction, that "for the person who gets addicted there is no indication whatsoever of specific personality characteristics". The American investigator Craig has enriched the literature with a thorough review of all empirical studies of personality characteristics of heroin dependents. He concludes that there is pathology, but not a specific one, and that particular personality characteristics of heroin dependents cannot be found. We might be tempted to react to all this with a very modern conclusion. In the current climate, with its preference for multi-causality, multi-functionality and even for multi-disciplinary research we have to accept that different psychological theories may apply when analysing or treating a case of addiction. I do not support this conclusion, because it leaves veiled the a-priori I mentioned at the beginning of this article.

At this point I would like to turn for a moment to a completely different so-called problem area, homosexuality. In the Netherlands, e.g., people have almost completely passed out a period when they considered homosexuality to be a mental disorder, a psychopathological state. A great variety of theories and scientists were preoccupied during this period with the 'problem' of homosexuality, without ever being able to reach a more or less homogeneous view of its causes or its treatment. But nevertheless, homosexuality was by common consent seen as a pathological disorder, either moral or mental, and mostly as both. This point of view has changed considerably. In fact, as homosexuality has reached a level of social acceptance and integration, so the matter has been dropped. As a result, its earlier problematic content -- translated into a scientific problem -- has petered out. During certain periods psychologists and psychiatrists seem to make observations and design theories about assumed pathological phenomena, in which they probably do little more than provide scientific rationalisations for social conventions. What is the plausibility of the hypothesis that our present theorizing in relation to addiction (in particular heroin addiction) takes as point of departure the a-priori which we have seen in the case of homosexuality? "Impossible," -- a therapist will remark -- "in my own work I have seen addicts who are as mad as a hatter. I really cannot see such people as constructions of my phantasies nor myself as promulgating invisible social prejudices. These people cry for help. So I need adequate psychological theory on which to base my therapies".

Our imagined therapist is right. Some addicts show incontestable pathology. I want to ask two questions here. How often does this occur? Or, in other words, how representative are heavily disturbed people (psychotic or prepsychotic) of the total population of drug dependents? Can we find a theory, maybe even for psychotic drug users but certainly for the mass of drug users or misusers, which does not explain drug use or misuse primarily in terms of psychopathological processes? For an answer to the first question I will refer not only to empirical research, but also to practical experience. Years ago the local government of Amsterdam was considering the enabling of the Health Authority to maintain a small group of addicts on prescriptions of morphine. For the members of this group a completely new word was coined: EPD. This stands for Extra Problematic Drug-user. In an unpublished report by the Health Authority the size of this group was estimated to be 120 people. An EPD is characterized by severe psychiatric disorder with concurrent physical and social neglect. We may assume that the other heroin dependents in Amsterdam (about 8000) do not belong to the EPD-group. This assumption is consistent with what is generally accepted in the literature about (the range of) the proportion of heavily disturbed people among drug dependents. But let us for a moment broaden our concept of pathological dependence to include all people we call junkies. They are the more conspicuous of heroin users, and in Amsterdam they were estimated to number 1200. Junkies are defined by their full time involvement in obtaining their prefered drug and if this is not available in finding a substitute. Not all of them look badly neglected, not least because many shoplifters, chequeforgers, and in particular prostitutes, cannot afford this.

For an answer to the second question: Norman Zinberg, an American analyst and psychiatrist tries to show how we construct the pathological and individual psychic source of junkie behaviour. He is not soft in his description of junkies who "look a lot alike: they are usually thin, their clothing shabby and their person somewhat unkempt. Initial conversations reveal their almost total preoccupation with heroin or its replacements and the life-style that surrounds its compulsive use". Furthermore they demonstrate a clear negative identity, they naively believe in all kinds of magical processes, they are paranoic and their deterioration of super-ego functions is dramatic. If something goes wrong, others are guilty. They cannot reason logically and their memory is bad. This is not minimal. But still Zinberg does not stop. He adds that their "everyday psychological state seems compatible with a diagnosis of borderline schizophrenia or worse". According to Zinberg, it follows that for a psychologist or a psychiatrist it is very attractive to use all these observations to construct psychological explanations of drug dependence. That is, explanations in which drug dependence is seen as being grounded in psychic characteristics which are evidently pathological and -- this is essential -- which were already present in the pre-morbid person before he got drug dependent.

But Zinberg is not convinced. He asks what evidence we have that the personality state in which these drug dependents present themselves to us, has anything to do with the psychic structure of the person before the onset of his drug dependency. According to him no such evidence is available and he finds it unacceptable to 'explain' the mental characteristics of heroin dependents by means of postulated unsolved mental problems which predated the addiction. This is a type of explanations he calls "retrospective falsification". Let us go back to Craig now. He concludes his review on the literature about personality characteristics of heroin dependents with many research recommendations. Craig's conclusion, that "it is impossible to ascertain if traits found in heroin addicts, predated addiction or were the result of it" brings him to recommend longitudinal studies that will answer this question. Elsewhere he states that "we are in desperate need for longitudinal studies concerning changes in personality over time". Craig does not move away from the psychological a-priori, although I consider the massive lack of evidence for a psychological explanation of heroin dependence the most essential part of his findings. Stanley Einstein has worded his doubts about the psychological a-priori in the following way: "What are the implications of relating to a dynamic living person -- a drug user -- from the theoretical perspective of a closed system stereotype?" In addition he states that we see the drug user as somebody who "differs significantly from us and others in our life space in a negative sense", a view he calls the theoretical dehumanization of the drug user. One could justly interpret these words as a combined criticism on both the psychological a-priori and the social conventions behind it. But in this case the argument is not elaborated.

When we agree with Zinberg and Craig, and accept that at least we make a highly unfounded judgement on the pathological content of something within an individual that makes him into a drug addict, how then can we explain the modes of behaviour we so often see in heroin dependent people. And if it were true that the strikingly uniform ways in which junkies appear to us are not to be connected to a set of definite personality traits, do we have to leave the realm of psychology altogether in our search for explanations? To deal with these questions I would like to return to Zinberg and in addition introduce some criminological notions as expressed by Leuw. Zinberg's response to the problem he himself helped to create is worded in both psychoanalytic and sociological terms. His opinion is that the social situation in which heroin users find themselves after a period of regular use creates a condition which he defines as stimulus-deprivation.

Because of severe disapproval and in many cases rejection by parents, wider family and long standing social contacts, heroin addicts increasingly lose essential sources of stimuli. It is precisely these stimuli which enable a person to maintain a measure of continuity and structure as a person. Referring to Rapaport, Zinberg assumes that the relative ego autonomy in relation to the Id and the environment is harmed or disturbed by this deprivation of social stimuli. Out of that condition emerges the process of 'junkieization' of heroin users. Junkie behaviour is not seen as arising from pathological traits within a pre-morbid person but from strong environmental forces which exclude people from standard forms of social relations by labeling them as extremely deviant or even dangerous. This might be compared to banishment to a public Siberia. Few could remain "normal" under such circumstances. I could even add here that a high degree of "normality" has to be assumed in order to account for sensitivity to stimulus deprivation. Zinberg's reasoning does not leave the domain of psychology at all, but it does end the primacy of psychological theory when trying to explain junkie behaviour.

And now Leuw. He published a clear and outstanding analysis of the social construction of the so-called heroin problem, but it is outside the scope of this article to summarize it adequately. I will draw only on a few details that supplement Zinberg's view. Leuw adopts much of the criminological theory of stigmatization, in which a distinction is made between primary and secondary deviance. In the case of heroin use primary deviance consists of consuming a substance that is socially seen as devilishly dangerous. Although it is quite possible to use heroin inconspicuously in a perfectly integrated life style, primary deviance almost always develops into a secondary one. For a host of reasons primary deviance creates repressive or rejective social reactions. The expulsion of the heroin user and his concurrent social retreat instigates the process of secondary deviance. In this process deviance becomes the "all defining characteristic of somebody", "for himself as well as for his surroundings". Also for Leuw it is social rejection that not only diminishes the range of adaptive behaviour but also seems to be a strong determinant of its content.

The difference between Zinberg and Leuw lies in the greater psychological detail which Zinberg uses, but for both it is neither the substance heroin nor the assumed psychological disorder within individuals that explain junkie-behaviour. For both, the explanation has to be found in a complex interaction between a person and several levels of the environment. A completed process of junkieization results in a heroin user who lives at the margIn of society, driven there by his friends, his parents, the police, social assistance or whatever. The heroin-using culture is the only environment where he is allowed to function. "The moral rejection and the (legal) repression did not only ban him from 'normal' society, they also convicted him to live in a psychologically very destructive milieu". In summary, we have seen that psychology or psychiatry offer a great many explanations of addiction. The supply is so large that almost any part of human development, of emotions and the pathology thereof can be causily connected to the emergence of addiction. Little wonder that empirical research cannot support an assumption that specific personality traits can be made to explain heroin addiction any more than was the case with alcohol addiction.

We may quietly consider it plausible that in a great many cases of addiction, psychology by itself lacks the competence to explain them. Denial of this involves a psychological apriori. The means by which this apriori is usually maintained was given the name of "retrospective falsification" by Zinberg. Of course psychology must play a role in a theory of addiction and addict behaviour, and so must psychopathology. But neither can play more than an auxiliary role within the broader social scientific theory of the addictions.

What conclusions should psychiatrists and psychologists draw from these arguments? Both groups of professionals are functional in preserving some of the important social factors that together cause the extreme rejection of heroin dependence. It is not that these professionals create this reality or the dependents by their strong labeling actions. This would be a naive and even nonsensical view because the social factors that uphold the rejection of heroin use are many. The view that regular heroin use or heroin dependence is pathological is one of these factors and may have the function of creating an ideological foundation of quasi-scientific status. However, even without this foundation social rejection would occur, probably because it has very important societal functions. How can we fit their observations into a broader social scientific view of addict behaviour? Those who see substance dependence solely as a developmental disorder cannot be very useful for such a theory. But those who look upon addiction as a quantitative aberration are already closer to a contribution. One might reason that the 'abnormality' of the intensity which is hypothesized in the craving for drugs does not necessarily have a disruptive function in the social development of a person. This is valid even for heroin dependency under present conditions of severe illegality. The intensity in itself could be without social (and thus personal) consequences if the drug user could keep his use secret, or contain the secrecy within a circle of trustees and if the user were able to prevent his conscience from fulfilling the role of an external rejecting agent.

But for many heroin users these preconditions do not exist. The financial burden of obtaining the illegal substance gives them away, and the consequences of being socially known as a user of forbidden substance take their inevitable toll. Subsequently, the pharmaceutical and subcultural consequences of substance use become dominant in such a way that substance dependence as a normal adaptation is hidden from view. In Mulder's words, this dominance becomes the "abnormal intensity" of the need for satisfaction. An additional problem is that current social judgement of heroin use are in part shared by most heroin users themselves, belonging as they do to the same dominant value system. The pain associated with this self-rejection adds to the intensity which, according to Mulder, is abnormal. This might explain the higher than average suicide rate found amongst heroin users, as was the case with homosexuals at the height of their persecution. This way of reasoning can also be applied to the evaluation of the psychological theory which looks upon addiction as a defense against very intense affects or the lack of them. Depression, depersonalization, great fury, apathy, emptiness: as adaptations to the many stages of a career into a social outcast they are not so strange. One could even empathize with them. This is also valid for the reported feeling of not being a person or in Kohut's words, a lack of psychic structure or self. I do not want to be misunderstood to be holding the view that these affects or states always develop after the onset of forbidden substance use. We should be fully aware, however, that what we call "pathological" emotions can have principally different etiologies. When we find them in heroin dependent people, the incidence of these emotional states alone is insufficient to locate their etiology in mental processes dating from before the consequences of illegal heroin use became operational.

The observations of these affect-theoreticians have remained useful. However, the theoretical framework in which they can find a place has changed. Where we should seek the explanation of addict behaviour is not the individual in which some pathological process has taken place, but in a polymorphic social interaction between a rejecting environment and a person who happens to like an illegal substance very much. For normal people it is this interaction which is pathogenic and which gives rise to the heroin addiction problem as we know it now. What I am saying, in essence is that the run-of-the-mill junkie has some characteristics which could be described as pathological, but which are better described as enforced emotional adaptations of normal persons. Extraordinary psychic pathology does exist in some heroin dependent people, but to use this picture as a generalization for all heroin users or addicts is very bad science. However, this way of reasoning does not explain why some people get addicted and some do not. This is indeed a challenge created by rejecting the psychological a priori.

In their essay on possible causal relationships between psychopathological processes and non-medical drug use, Schuster, Renault, and Blaine argue that there is no reason to assume that the use of opiates cannot be normal human behaviour. Their problem is to explain why in our cultures it is seen as abnormal. They suggest that social factors transform opiate use into an exception, and they recommend research to clarify these factors and their operation. One could ask, agreeing with Schuster et al. how it is possible that the social factors of which they speak are in a great many cases, mitigated or neutralized. Fortunately "becoming deviant" is a research topic in criminology. Matza even looks into the concept of pathology in this context. The concept of subculture is of central importance here. In his study "Drug use and Subculture" Cohen shows how subcultural influences ease the emergence of behaviour which is looked upon as deviant or even criminal by others outside the subculture. The drug scene provides participants with a different selfconcept, different ideology, ways of defensive communication, warning systems against invasions of the subcultural sphere, rituals, forms of magic and last but not least, with attractive new personal relations. Clearly the emergence of subcultures explains much concerning why some people get addicted and others not. Matters like proximity are vital here, and possibly chance plays some role. More important, the emergence of subcultures is not arbitrary. Subcultures are specific reactions to broad social developments that sensitize either one -or an other social substratum into creating them or being attracted to them.

At the present moment opiate use is clearly bound up with specific youth subcultures, in contrast to the opiate use of some 60 years ago when it was called the illness of the better classes. The similarity in primary deviance between such completely different groups is in itself a very interesting theme. But the challenge of explaining why some people get addicted and others not, although all belong to the same social strata, may not be completely met by the concepts of deviance and subculture. It is worthwhile focussing research on this problem, without falling back upon the psychological a-priori. The habit of psychologists and psychiatrists of connecting use and misuse of drugs primarily to psychopathological processes in individuals helps to maintain the present heroin problem. This may be sad, but the consistent failure of the greater part of therapeutic work with drug addicts and the history of our drug policy allow no other conclusion. The real help that these professional groups could give to heroin dependents is to cease every intervention that confirms the drug addict in his role of social outcast and failure. Therapists have to make a conceptual and ideological 'volte face' by accepting the drug dependency of a person.

This actually implies their leaving the field of the drug-issue altogether but for the time being this is not very likely. But as long as they are involved in drug problems, they should help addicts to function in spite of social rejection, by supplying drugs in a pure form, and by encouraging the emergence of better regulated ways to consume them. The goal is not abstinence, but amelioration of the social position of the drug addict as much as possible. A consequence of this might be that a body of generally accepted rules emerges for dealing with opiates, as is already the case regarding the way we deal with alcohol. According to Hunt and Zinberg, these rules play an essential part in the (self) regulation of drug use. Maybe it will eventually be possible to make a contribution towards changing the relationship between users and non users of opiates so that the pathogenic interaction between these two groups becomes less oppressive, and thereby less risky for both. I strongly oppose the use of psychotherapy in the bulk of drug dependence cases, even if the addict himself asks for it because of his addiction. For, is psychotherapy here not the quasi-scientific treatment of the suffering from social prejudice, a prejudice the addict himself has not been able to escape, alas?

Title: Moses of Michelangelo
Post by: I Do (But I Dont) on November 16, 2008, 03:37:49 PM

das Geviert, innocent as Leonardo's vulture phantasy is, I bet the poor man would have never ever written it, had he known a paranoid individual like Sigmund Freud would make such a big deal out of it!!!

Have you read his paper on Michelangelo's Moses? THEN you'd be right to say Freud is unbelievable!

(http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/252/mosesib0.jpg)

He completed his paper, "The Moses of Michelangelo," on New Year's Day, 1914; he had been thinking about it for at least 13 years, struggling with it, talking to his colleagues about it. His thoughts reached a pitch of intensity in 1912 and 1913. But once the paper was completed, he still did not want to publish it. Jones, Ferenczi, Abraham, Rank, and Sachs were dismayed. Freud told them he had more doubts about its conclusions than usual; he worried that it might seem amateurish. The paper meant something more to him than other papers had. Finally, he gave in to his friends' good advice, but he still insisted that it be published anonymously! Why? "It is only a joke," he wrote Jones, "but perhaps not a bad one." To Abraham, he also wrote, "It is only a joke." Not for 10 years would Freud publicly admit authorship. 19 years after its completion, he wrote Edoardo Weiss: "My feeling for this piece of work is rather like that towards a love-child. For 3 lonely September weeks in 1913 I stood every day in the church in front of the statue, studied it, measured it, sketched it, until I captured the understanding for it which I ventured to express in the essay only anonymously. Only much later did I legitimatize this non-analytical child."

Every day by himself before a piece of marble for 3 weeks? Love-child? This after 11 years of regular visits to the object of his fascination? And then he was unwilling to put his name to the paper. Freud had had similar uncharacteristic reactions to "Totem and Taboo" and later would to "Moses and Monotheism," two other works he was inclined to publish anonymously. "The Moses of Michelangelo" was more than a demonstration of the application of the psychoanalytic way of thinking, more than a scholarly exercise. It was a work of art itself, thus a personal statement. But was Freud being self-deprecatory and trivializing when he called it a joke? In "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious," Freud found similarities between jokes and works of art. What about the "love-child" comment? It appears that child was the product of breaking the rules which purport to separate science from art, rules which would dictate conformity and submission to authority rather than revolution, and rules which call only for conventional solutions to oedipal dilemmas.

Have you read his paper on Michelangelo's Moses? THEN you'd be right to say Freud is unbelievable!

(http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/252/mosesib0.jpg)

He completed his paper, "The Moses of Michelangelo," on New Year's Day, 1914; he had been thinking about it for at least 13 years, struggling with it, talking to his colleagues about it. His thoughts reached a pitch of intensity in 1912 and 1913. But once the paper was completed, he still did not want to publish it. Jones, Ferenczi, Abraham, Rank, and Sachs were dismayed. Freud told them he had more doubts about its conclusions than usual; he worried that it might seem amateurish. The paper meant something more to him than other papers had. Finally, he gave in to his friends' good advice, but he still insisted that it be published anonymously! Why? "It is only a joke," he wrote Jones, "but perhaps not a bad one." To Abraham, he also wrote, "It is only a joke." Not for 10 years would Freud publicly admit authorship. 19 years after its completion, he wrote Edoardo Weiss: "My feeling for this piece of work is rather like that towards a love-child. For 3 lonely September weeks in 1913 I stood every day in the church in front of the statue, studied it, measured it, sketched it, until I captured the understanding for it which I ventured to express in the essay only anonymously. Only much later did I legitimatize this non-analytical child."

Every day by himself before a piece of marble for 3 weeks? Love-child? This after 11 years of regular visits to the object of his fascination? And then he was unwilling to put his name to the paper. Freud had had similar uncharacteristic reactions to "Totem and Taboo" and later would to "Moses and Monotheism," two other works he was inclined to publish anonymously. "The Moses of Michelangelo" was more than a demonstration of the application of the psychoanalytic way of thinking, more than a scholarly exercise. It was a work of art itself, thus a personal statement. But was Freud being self-deprecatory and trivializing when he called it a joke? In "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious," Freud found similarities between jokes and works of art. What about the "love-child" comment? It appears that child was the product of breaking the rules which purport to separate science from art, rules which would dictate conformity and submission to authority rather than revolution, and rules which call only for conventional solutions to oedipal dilemmas.

I Do, writing is like prostitution. First you do it for the love of it, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for money.

Copyright issues have traditionally been not given the importance they deserve. That's have been the case even in the US, let alone in less developed countries. When I was in school in Russia I remember many professiors who'd translate books from English to Russian and publish it as if they had written it themselves, under their own name. We as students would not mind it had the books been translated correctly.. but these "professors" did not even know English good enough!

Not every book that comes out in the US is a candidate for a foreign deal. For those that are however, the overseas market, while not likely to make the publisher or the author rich beyond their wildest imaginations, is definitely worth exploring. And of course by "foreign" I mean a deal made by an owner in the United States with a publisher in another nation. There are essentially 2 and perhaps 3 forms of foreign deals. The first is the right that the owner of foreign rights has to license the translation of the English version of the book into a foreign language. The second is the right to license the reprint of the book in the English language and sell the same in a local territory. There is also an export deal in which the American publisher sells the very same book that is distributed in the U.S. to a foreign publisher at a discount. The foreign publisher merely is distributing the U.S. book in that territory.

The question as to who owns the right to make these deals is the subject of the agreement between author and publisher. Since copyright initially resides in the creator of the work-usually the author unless it is a work for hire situation-how much of that bundle of rights called copyright the author gives away is what that agreement is all about. Part of the negotiation will involve foreign rights of the sorts mentioned above. However, there are often other parties who may have rights that may prevent the making of a foreign deal including but not limited to artists, illustrators, editors and even, in some instances, distributors and other parties. Therefore, the publisher must carefully review all of its agreements (or the lack of such agreements) to make sure it can actually make a foreign deal.

The normal kind of deal for a book that originally was published in the US generally involves a royalty and hopefully an advance against that royalty. The size of the advance varies depending upon the size of the market and the success or lack of it that the book enjoyed in the U.S. among other factors. For example, reprint rights to a large territory, such as the UK or Germany, might bring a larger advance than a similar deal for Portugal. The same for translations. And since all books are not interchangeable, the rule of thumb for determining the size of the advance is based upon the "WYCG" approach. "WYCG" is the technical legal term for "Whatever You Can Get." If the buyer feels the book is going to do particularly well in the territory, that buyer may be willing to pay a larger advance for the rights. In all negotiations, the end result depends upon the relative bargaining position of the parties. The advance will be applied against a royalty rate that varies and which is likely to be based upon the retail price or cover price in the market. However, there may be other royalty provisions for foreign book clubs, flat fee licenses made by the foreign licensee and so on. The actual royalties in turn may be subject to other calculations that may reduce the effective royalty from the stated rate and these factors should be the subject of negotiation as well.

http://www.ivanhoffman.com/royalties.html

Royalty rates vary depending on three major factors: format of the book (hardcover, paperback, illustrated, four-color), the buyers (independent bookstores, mass merchandisers, QVC), and the terms on which the book was bought. Anything special the publisher adds to your book -- color, glossy paper, a page that folds out, stickers -- naturally adds to the production costs, with the publisher lowering your royalty. Royalties on four-color (called "full-color") books or books with special features can have their royalties cut in half. The good news, though, is that if your book does well, the initial production costs go down as you sell more copies.

Hardvocer: 10% to 5,000 copies 12.5% to 10,000 copies 15% thereafter

Trade Paperback: 7.5% for all copies

Mass-Market Paperback: 8% to 150,000 copies 10% thereafter

Often a publisher will reward you with a higer royalty rate if you sell more than a specified number of books. This is called an escalator. For example, if you sell more than 50,000 copies of your book, your publisher might be persuaded to go from a 7.5% trade paperback royalty to an 8% royalty.

Many authors are aghast when they discover that they receive only between 5% and 15% of the sale price of their book, while the publisher keeps between 85% and 95%. However, it might be more shocking to learn that the publisher sometimes earns even less per book than the author does. If your book sells for $15 and the average wholesale price is $7.50, then the remaining $7.50 has to cover all the publisher's costs (your initial advance, your royalty, the production costs, shipping costs, paying for any outside staff who'll work on your book and a very large overhead).

It's not impossible that you will have to finish your book before the contract is done. Talk about an act of extreme faith! This will be sometimes in your best interest. Do not, though, turn anything before your contract is signed, the check has cleared and the money is in your pocket.

Always retain the copyright to your work. Some publishers write in their contracts that they "may" register an author's work. Some say in the contract that they own the copyright. Neither situation is acceptable. Under all circumstances, you want it stated in your contract that the publisher shall register the copyright in your name.

Sub-rights are those rights that are secondary to the primary rights granted to the publisher: rights to the hardcover and/or paperback version of the book that is sold in the US (or wherever the primary publisher is). Sales of the work in a different format -- audiobook, a TV show or a large-print edition -- are considered subsidiary rights. Sales of the work in a different territory like the UK, Japan or Brazil are also considered subsidiary rights, typically covered under the "foreign rights" section of the contract. (Yours first, publisher's second)

First serial (appearance of part of your book in a magazine just before or coinciding with its publication): 90/10

Have you read his paper on Michelangelo's Moses? THEN you'd be right to say Freud is unbelievable!

(http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/252/mosesib0.jpg)

He completed his paper, "The Moses of Michelangelo," on New Year's Day, 1914; he had been thinking about it for at least 13 years, struggling with it, talking to his colleagues about it. His thoughts reached a pitch of intensity in 1912 and 1913. But once the paper was completed, he still did not want to publish it. Jones, Ferenczi, Abraham, Rank, and Sachs were dismayed. Freud told them he had more doubts about its conclusions than usual; he worried that it might seem amateurish. The paper meant something more to him than other papers had. Finally, he gave in to his friends' good advice, but he still insisted that it be published anonymously! Why? "It is only a joke," he wrote Jones, "but perhaps not a bad one." To Abraham, he also wrote, "It is only a joke." Not for 10 years would Freud publicly admit authorship. 19 years after its completion, he wrote Edoardo Weiss: "My feeling for this piece of work is rather like that towards a love-child. For 3 lonely September weeks in 1913 I stood every day in the church in front of the statue, studied it, measured it, sketched it, until I captured the understanding for it which I ventured to express in the essay only anonymously. Only much later did I legitimatize this non-analytical child."

Every day by himself before a piece of marble for 3 weeks? Love-child? This after 11 years of regular visits to the object of his fascination? And then he was unwilling to put his name to the paper. Freud had had similar uncharacteristic reactions to "Totem and Taboo" and later would to "Moses and Monotheism," two other works he was inclined to publish anonymously. "The Moses of Michelangelo" was more than a demonstration of the application of the psychoanalytic way of thinking, more than a scholarly exercise. It was a work of art itself, thus a personal statement. But was Freud being self-deprecatory and trivializing when he called it a joke? In "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious," Freud found similarities between jokes and works of art. What about the "love-child" comment? It appears that child was the product of breaking the rules which purport to separate science from art, rules which would dictate conformity and submission to authority rather than revolution, and rules which call only for conventional solutions to oedipal dilemmas.

Excuse my ignorance and laziness to look it up, but what the deal is with Micha's Moses and Freud's interpretation?

(http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/1658/rembrandtharmenszvanrijxw9.jpg)Moses and the Tablets, Rembrandt

By all accounts, the revelation at Sinai was one of the great moments in religious history, sufficiently powerful to have transformed a complaining and bedraggled mixture of slaves and rabble into a God-enthused nation dedicated to the ideal of perfecting the world in the kingship of the Divine. The one tangible result of that one-time-epiphany came in the form of two tablets recording the Ten Commandments. After 40 days and 40 nights on the mountain with God, Moses descended from Sinai, carrying "tablets inscribed on both their surfaces ... The tablets were God's work, and the writing was God's writing." However, the Israelites sank to the depravity of worshipping a golden calf when Moses, their leader, did not return when expected. Moses became enraged by the Israelites' idolatry, and he smashed the tablets, written by the finger of God, to smithereens. At the same time, the great prophet-leader of his people beseeched God to forgive the errant tribes, and caused the Almighty to present a second set of tablets replacing the first.

Now Freud contended that while rising and letting the tablets slip, Michelangelo's Moses gained control of his rage; thus, the right hand was retracted in the beard, pulling it along in the wake of his gesture, and clamping down on the slipping tablets along with the tension of his inner right arm. Freud believed that Michelangelo's Moses was and always will be a figure in the act of restraining himself from rising in the anger of his own passion.

(http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/1658/rembrandtharmenszvanrijxw9.jpg)Moses and the Tablets, Rembrandt

By all accounts, the revelation at Sinai was one of the great moments in religious history, sufficiently powerful to have transformed a complaining and bedraggled mixture of slaves and rabble into a God-enthused nation dedicated to the ideal of perfecting the world in the kingship of the Divine. The one tangible result of that one-time-epiphany came in the form of two tablets recording the Ten Commandments. After 40 days and 40 nights on the mountain with God, Moses descended from Sinai, carrying "tablets inscribed on both their surfaces ... The tablets were God's work, and the writing was God's writing." However, the Israelites sank to the depravity of worshipping a golden calf when Moses, their leader, did not return when expected. Moses became enraged by the Israelites' idolatry, and he smashed the tablets, written by the finger of God, to smithereens. At the same time, the great prophet-leader of his people beseeched God to forgive the errant tribes, and caused the Almighty to present a second set of tablets replacing the first.

Now Freud contended that while rising and letting the tablets slip, Michelangelo's Moses gained control of his rage; thus, the right hand was retracted in the beard, pulling it along in the wake of his gesture, and clamping down on the slipping tablets along with the tension of his inner right arm. Freud believed that Michelangelo's Moses was and always will be a figure in the act of restraining himself from rising in the anger of his own passion.

(http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/1658/rembrandtharmenszvanrijxw9.jpg)Moses and the Tablets, Rembrandt

By all accounts, the revelation at Sinai was one of the great moments in religious history, sufficiently powerful to have transformed a complaining and bedraggled mixture of slaves and rabble into a God-enthused nation dedicated to the ideal of perfecting the world in the kingship of the Divine. The one tangible result of that one-time-epiphany came in the form of two tablets recording the Ten Commandments. After 40 days and 40 nights on the mountain with God, Moses descended from Sinai, carrying "tablets inscribed on both their surfaces ... The tablets were God's work, and the writing was God's writing." However, the Israelites sank to the depravity of worshipping a golden calf when Moses, their leader, did not return when expected. Moses became enraged by the Israelites' idolatry, and he smashed the tablets, written by the finger of God, to smithereens. At the same time, the great prophet-leader of his people beseeched God to forgive the errant tribes, and caused the Almighty to present a second set of tablets replacing the first.

Now Freud contended that while rising and letting the tablets slip, Michelangelo's Moses gained control of his rage; thus, the right hand was retracted in the beard, pulling it along in the wake of his gesture, and clamping down on the slipping tablets along with the tension of his inner right arm. Freud believed that Michelangelo's Moses was and always will be a figure in the act of restraining himself from rising in the anger of his own passion.

Sincerely, I just don't get why Freud is making such a big deal about it - did not God provide a second set after Moses smashed the original tablets?

It is in his/her interest, after all, for people to have a copy of them!

[...] Freud had had similar uncharacteristic reactions to "Totem and Taboo" and later would to "Moses and Monotheism," two other works he was inclined to publish anonymously.

In "Moses and Mono­theism," which was published in 1939, the same year Freud died, he boldly repeats his theory from "Totem and Taboo," although having received substantial criticism for it, during the quarter-century since he presented it. If anything, he proclaims it with even less reservation:

Quote

That conviction I acquired a quarter of a century ago, when I wrote my book on "Totem and Taboo" (in 1912), and it has only become stronger since. From then on I have never doubted that religious phenomena are to be understood only on the model of the neurotic symptoms of the individual, which are so familiar to us, as a return to of long-forgotten important happenings in the primeval history of the human family, that they owe their obsessive character to that very origin and therefore derive their effect on mankind from the historical truth they contain.

He gives a narrated form of summary of the primordial event of the father murder, more precisely and to the point than in his earlier book, and begins it with the following reservation, which was more vaguely implied in Totem and Taboo:

Quote

The story is told in a very condensed way, as if what in reality took centuries to achieve, and during that long time was repeated innumerably, had happened only once.

Because of its fluent clarity, its added detail from his version in Totem and Taboo, and its similarity to many a myth, I can't resist repeating it in its entirety:

Quote

The strong male was the master and father of the whole horde, unlimited in his power, which he used brutally. All females were his property, the wives and daughters in his own horde as well as perhaps also those stolen from other hordes. The fate of the sons was a hard one; if they excited their father's jealousy they were killed or castrated or driven out. They were forced to live in small communities and to provide themselves with wives by stealing them from others. The one or the other son might succeed in attaining a situation similar to that of the father in the original horde. One favored position came about in a natural way: it was that of the youngest son, who, protected by his mother's love, could profit by his father's advancing years and replace him after his death. An echo of the expulsion of the eldest son, as well as of the favored position of the youngest, seems to linger in many myths and fairy-tales.

The next decisive step towards changing this first kind of "social" organization lies in the following suggestion: the brothers who had been driven out and lived together in a community clubbed together, overcame the father, and – according to the custom of those times – all partook on his body.

(http://img505.imageshack.us/img505/6971/cainaz0.jpg)Cain kills Abel

In "Moses and Monotheism," Freud expands and clarifies his theory somewhat. He specifies the stages gone through by mankind as a whole, in comparison to the individual neurotic stages of "early trauma – defense – latency – outbreak of the neurosis – partial return of the repressed material." The analogy makes additional sense, since he claims that: "the genesis of the neurosis always goes back to very early impressions in childhood." Also for mankind, the father murder supposedly took place at an early stage, a childhood of sorts, of its development. He describes the process:

Quote

Mankind as a whole also passed through conflicts of a sexual aggressive nature, which left permanent traces, but which were for the most part warded off and forgotten, later after a long period of latency, they came to life again and created phenomena similar in structure and tendency to neurotic symptoms.

The latency mentioned, which exists both in the individual and the collective, is a sort of mental period of incubation, where the traumatic event is forgotten to the conscious mind, but remains subconsciously and gains strength, so that when it erupts, it is much more potent than it was at the time of the traumatic event:

Quote

It is specially worthy of note that every memory returning from the forgotten past does so with great force, produces an incomparably strong influence on the mass of mankind, and puts forward an irresistible claim to be believed, against which all logical objections remain powerless – very much like the credo quia absurdum.

He compares this phenomenon to the delusion in a psychotic, having a long forgotten core of truth that upon reemerging becomes both distorted and compulsive. As a consequence of this latency, Freud needs to explain how something forgotten can remain through generations, to emerge in people as a very vivid and powerful memory of sorts. In "Totem and Taboo" he supposed no forgetting of the father murder, on the other hand he did not specify that the memory was kept through the generations. What was implied was an established totemism, containing the trauma of the father murder and continuing to be obeyed, long after the actual event had been forgotten. In "Moses and Monotheism" he introduces latency, the suppressed memory able to reemerge, and therefore needs to explain this process. Doing so, he comes strikingly close to Carl Jung's theories of the collective unconscious and the archetypes. Freud states very clearly that people did forget about the initial event:

Quote

In the course of thousands of centuries it certainly became forgotten that there was a primeval father possessing the qualities I mentioned, and what fate he met.

He uses the analogy with the individual, whose traumatic memory is repressed, buried deep in the unconscious, but has not disappeared, wherefore it can emerge, and when doing so has the intensity described above. Both the individual and the collective has this ability:

Quote

hold that the concordance between the individual and the mass is in this point almost complete. The masses, too, retain an impression of the past in unconscious memory traces.

Such repressed memories may emerge in certain circumstances. With collective memories, this is most likely to happen because of recent events, which are similar to those repressed. Now, Freud speculates that the individual does not have only personal memories stored in the unconscious, but also: "what he brought with him at birth, fragments of phylogenetic origin, an archaic heritage." He does not try to explain how such a memory can be kept and transported through the generations, but finds support for it in observations of patients. When they react to early traumata, when an Oedipus or castration complex is examined, other than purely personal experiences seem to emerge. These make more sense if regarded as somehow inherited from earlier generations. Freud believes that they are part of what he calls the archaic heritage.

He also uses the argument of "the universality of speech symbolism," the ability to have one object symbolically substituted by another, especially strong in children. This symbolism is also at work in dreams, and Freud regards it as an ability inherited from the time that speech was developing. He is rather diffuse here, since he gives no examples of what kinds of objects and symbols he refers to. He does admit that the science of biology allows no acquired abilities to be transmitted to descendants, but boldly states: "I cannot picture biological development proceeding without taking this factor into account." He also compares with animals, which he regards as fundamentally not very different from human beings in this aspect – the archaic heritage of the "human animal" may differ in extent and character, but "corresponds to the instincts of animals." What makes a memory enter the archaic heritage is if it is important enough or repeated enough times, or both. Regarding the primeval father murder, he is quite certain:

Quote

Men have always known – in this particular way – that once upon a time they had a primeval father and killed him.

These theories have a striking resemblance to Jung's ideas of the collective unconscious and the archetypes. They even use similar ways to argue for their theories. Still, Freud makes no mention of Jung, and no comparison with his models. They were, of course, distanced since decades, and not on speaking terms – but it is highly unlikely that Freud was not aware of Jung's theories, which were well developed and widely known in the time of "Moses and Monotheism." It is also quite unlikely that Freud would not recognize and ponder the similarities.

Freud claims that Moses was not Jewish but an Egyptian, befriending a Jewish tribe, taking it out of Egypt and converting it to his monotheistic religion, that of pharaoh Ikhnaton, the Aton religion of a single sun god. The reason for a monotheistic god at all appearing in otherwise abundantly polytheistic Egypt, Freud finds in the imperialistic success of Egypt, immediately preceding the cult of Aton: "God was the reflection of a Pharaoh autocratically governing a great world Empire." Then Freud imagines a fate of Moses, similar to that of the primeval tyrant father:

Quote

The Jews, who even according to the Bible were stubborn and unruly towards their law-giver and leader, rebelled at last, killed him, and threw off the imposed Aton religion as the Egyptians had done before them.

The idea of Moses being killed by the Jewish tribe, Freud readily admits to have picked up from a 1922 text by German theologist and biblical archaeologist Ernst Sellin. Later on, Freud has this Jewish tribe meet and join with another, and as part of the compromise between them, they adapted the worship of a volcano-god Jahve, influenced by the Arabian Midianites. In an effort to release themselves of the guilt for having killed Moses, that tribe insisted on proclaiming him the father of this new monotheistic religion. In that way, they were almost accomplishing the father worship, which Freud makes the basis of his theory on the origin of religion. Another consequence was:

Quote

In the course of time Jahve lost his own character and became more and more like the old God of Moses, Aton.

(http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/1658/rembrandtharmenszvanrijxw9.jpg)Moses and the Tablets, Rembrandt

By all accounts, the revelation at Sinai was one of the great moments in religious history, sufficiently powerful to have transformed a complaining and bedraggled mixture of slaves and rabble into a God-enthused nation dedicated to the ideal of perfecting the world in the kingship of the Divine. The one tangible result of that one-time-epiphany came in the form of two tablets recording the Ten Commandments. After 40 days and 40 nights on the mountain with God, Moses descended from Sinai, carrying "tablets inscribed on both their surfaces ... The tablets were God's work, and the writing was God's writing." However, the Israelites sank to the depravity of worshipping a golden calf when Moses, their leader, did not return when expected. Moses became enraged by the Israelites' idolatry, and he smashed the tablets, written by the finger of God, to smithereens. At the same time, the great prophet-leader of his people beseeched God to forgive the errant tribes, and caused the Almighty to present a second set of tablets replacing the first.

Now Freud contended that while rising and letting the tablets slip, Michelangelo's Moses gained control of his rage; thus, the right hand was retracted in the beard, pulling it along in the wake of his gesture, and clamping down on the slipping tablets along with the tension of his inner right arm. Freud believed that Michelangelo's Moses was and always will be a figure in the act of restraining himself from rising in the anger of his own passion.

inspired minds, I don't know if your username bears any relation to the content of your post, but I would safely say that Freud appears to have had a very lively imagination and was definitely a great creative writer.

For example most cocaine users do not lose control. Apparently some "control mechanisms" exist and they are not restricted to cocaine. This conclusion has been reached by a growing number of drug researchers. A full understanding of control mechanisms is still lacking as well as a a thorough theoretical investigation of this concept itself. But, assuming the validity of such a concept, one of the regulators of drug use might very well be a relative change in drug related pleasure when drug use exceeds certain limits. A cocaine study has showed for instance that when a level of use of 2.5 grams of cocaine per week is exceeded, the number of reported unpleasant negative effects rises steeply. This could very well be one of the explanations of why levels above 2.5 gram per week are so rarely maintained over longer periods in experienced cocaine users, even though many respondents are very well able to financially support such levels of use.

By Nick Allen 11 Nov 2008

(http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/5143/cocaine1111822clj8.jpg)

The discovery opens up the possibility that potential drug users could be screened to see if they are likely to develop an addiction. A study of 670 cocaine addicts found they were 25% more likely to carry the gene variant than people who did not use the drug. Rainer Spanagel, professor of psychopharmacology at the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany, who led the study, said: "If you are a carrier of this gene variant the likelihood of getting addicted to cocaine is higher. You can certainly use this as a vulnerability marker for cocaine addiction." The "cocaine gene" is a variant of the CAMK4 gene and was identified after an initial study on mice.

Scientists believe cocaine addiction is as hereditary as mental health conditions including schizophrenia, and even more so than alcoholism. Studies suggest genetic factors account for about 50% of alcoholism while cocaine addiction is about 70% genetic. Professor Spanagel suggested those with the cocaine gene could receive counselling to prevent them becoming addicted. They could also be given experimental vaccines, currently in development, which counter the addictive effects of the drug. There are more cocaine users in Britain that anywhere else in Europe, according to the European Union's drug agency.

Don't get me started with doctors and their stupid perscriptions! My aunt (my mother's sister) was perscribed monstrous amounts of aspirin for quite a few years. She was taken to the ER one night and underwent surgery for perforated ulcer.

Perforated ulcer? Take the stupid doctor and his hospital to court for having perscribed all that * & ^ %!

It's like holding a mirror up to a mirror. At first it seems like an 'infinite regress,' but then the observer spontaneously dissolves. [...]

[...]

A very good way to put it! In Russell Edson's "The Tormented Mirror" there's this patented technique in creating a world of reverberation by holding a mirror up to a mirror. In doing so, the poet opens up a wormhole into the possibilities of being. Edson's poem "Sleep," permits the reader to examine some reflections of reflections beneath the mundane reflection of those who are supposedly awake and bored with day-to-day existence:

SLEEP

There was a man who didn't know how to sleep; nodding off every night into a drab, unprofessional sleep.Sleep that he had grown so tired of sleeping.He tried reading The Manual of Sleep, but it just put him to sleep. That same old sleep that he had grown sotired of sleep-ing ...

[...]When they react to early traumata, when an Oedipus or castration complex is examined, other than purely personal experiences seem to emerge. [...]

Doors' "The End" appears to feature Freud's Oedipus complex:

This is the endyou gentle friend <- yeah, how 'bout "beautiful friend"This is the endMy only friend, the endOf our elaborate plans, the endOf everything that stands, the endNo safety or surprise, the endI'll never look into your eyesAgain

Can you picture what we’ll be,So limitless and free?Desperately in needOf some stranger's handIn a desperate land

Lost in a RomanWilderness of painAnd all the children are insaneAll the children are insaneWaiting for the summer rain, yeah

There's danger on the edge of townRide the king’s highwayWeird scenes inside the goldmineRide the highway west, baby

The killer awoke before dawnHe put his boots onHe took a face from the ancient gallery and heWalked on down the hallAnd he went into the room where his sister livedAnd...then he... paid a visit to his brother, and then he…He walked on down the hall, yeahAnd he came to a doorAnd he looked insideFather?"Yes son?"I want to kill you…Mother? I want to... @ # ! * you all night yeah,Come on, yeah

Come on baby, take a chance with usCome on baby, take a chance with usCome on baby, take a chance with us andMeet me at the back of the blue busDoin' a blue rockOn the blue bus <- on "a" blue busDoin' a blue rockCome on, yeah

This is the endyou gentle friend <- once again, "beautiful friend"This is the endMy only friend, the endIt hurts to set you freeBut you'll never follow meThe end of laughterAnd soft liesThe end of nights we tried to die

[...]When they react to early traumata, when an Oedipus or castration complex is examined, other than purely personal experiences seem to emerge. [...]

Doors' "The End" appears to feature Freud's Oedipus complex:

This is the endyou gentle friend <- yeah, how 'bout "beautiful friend"This is the endMy only friend, the endOf our elaborate plans, the endOf everything that stands, the endNo safety or surprise, the endI'll never look into your eyesAgain

Can you picture what we’ll be,So limitless and free?Desperately in needOf some stranger's handIn a desperate land

Lost in a RomanWilderness of painAnd all the children are insaneAll the children are insaneWaiting for the summer rain, yeah

There's danger on the edge of townRide the king’s highwayWeird scenes inside the goldmineRide the highway west, baby

The killer awoke before dawnHe put his boots onHe took a face from the ancient gallery and heWalked on down the hallAnd he went into the room where his sister livedAnd...then he... paid a visit to his brother, and then he…He walked on down the hall, yeahAnd he came to a doorAnd he looked insideFather?"Yes son?"I want to kill you…Mother? I want to... @ # ! * you all night yeah,Come on, yeah

Come on baby, take a chance with usCome on baby, take a chance with usCome on baby, take a chance with us andMeet me at the back of the blue busDoin' a blue rockOn the blue bus <- on "a" blue busDoin' a blue rockCome on, yeah

This is the endyou gentle friend <- once again, "beautiful friend"This is the endMy only friend, the endIt hurts to set you freeBut you'll never follow meThe end of laughterAnd soft liesThe end of nights we tried to die

As early as August 1912, Jung had intimated a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-tones archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth psychology. This takes us to the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia. Pistis Sophia is an important Gnostic text. The five remaining copies, which scholars date c. 250­-300 AD, relate the Gnostic teachings of the transfigured Jesus to the assembled disciples (including his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Martha), when the risen Christ had accomplished 11 years speaking with his disciples. In it the complex structures and hierarchies of heaven familiar in Gnostic teachings are revealed. The female divinity of gnosticism is Sophia, a being with many aspects and names. She is sometimes identified with the Holy Ghost itself but, according to her various capacities, is also the Universal Mother, the Mother of the Living or Resplendent Mother, the Power on High, She-of-the-left-hand (as opposed to Christ, understood as her husband and he of the Right Hand), as the Luxurious One, the Womb, the Virgin, the Wife of the Male, the Revealer of Perfect Mysteries, the Saint Columba of the Spirit, the Heavenly Mother, the Wandering One, or Elena (that is, Selene, the Moon). She was envisaged as the Psyche of the world and the female aspect of Logos.

Jung has been called weird by many because of his interest in the occult. Freud, for instance, would write to Jung in response to his letter:

Jung: \'My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you... I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment.\'

Freud: \'In matters of occultism I have grown humble since the great lesson Ferenczi s experiences gave me. I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall do so gladly, that you know. But my hubris has been shattered.\'

As early as August 1912, Jung had intimated a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-tones archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth psychology. This takes us to the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia. Pistis Sophia is an important Gnostic text. The five remaining copies, which scholars date c. 250­-300 AD, relate the Gnostic teachings of the transfigured Jesus to the assembled disciples (including his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Martha), when the risen Christ had accomplished 11 years speaking with his disciples. In it the complex structures and hierarchies of heaven familiar in Gnostic teachings are revealed. The female divinity of gnosticism is Sophia, a being with many aspects and names. She is sometimes identified with the Holy Ghost itself but, according to her various capacities, is also the Universal Mother, the Mother of the Living or Resplendent Mother, the Power on High, She-of-the-left-hand (as opposed to Christ, understood as her husband and he of the Right Hand), as the Luxurious One, the Womb, the Virgin, the Wife of the Male, the Revealer of Perfect Mysteries, the Saint Columba of the Spirit, the Heavenly Mother, the Wandering One, or Elena (that is, Selene, the Moon). She was envisaged as the Psyche of the world and the female aspect of Logos.

Jung has been called weird by many because of his interest in the occult. Freud, for instance, would write to Jung in response to his letter:

Jung: "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you... I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment."

Freud: "In matters of occultism I have grown humble since the great lesson Ferenczi's experiences gave me. I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall do so gladly, that you know. But my hubris has been shattered."

Yet, early on Freud himself dabbled in the Kabbala, the esoteric branch of Jewish mysticism. He belonged to a Jewish society called B'nai B'rith and enjoyed weekly games of taroc, a complicated and popular card game which some people think is based on Kabbala. The taroc deck varies in size, but it includes 22 trump cards from the tarot, which are rich in symbolic imagery. The symbolism on these cards may well have set Freud on the path towards his first ideas about the unconscious: it was at this time that he presented his first ideas about dream interpretation. This information has been largely suppresed, probably because it wasn't approved of in Freud's contemporary society, with its rising tide of fierce anti-semitism. Later Freud strongly disapproved in public of what he called 'the occult.'

By the way, in academic circles Freud was often seen as opinionated and rather peculiar so that much of his work was done in what he called 'splendid isolation,' just as it had been from boyhood. He obviously had outstanding intellect, but by his own admission, he had a rather neurotic, obsessive personality and could not imagine a life without work He wrote incessantly and much of his writing was done on his days off, or even after a busy day seeing his patients. Freud's obsessive personality meant that he was the kind of person who has to do everything meticulously and accurately and he liked to be in control. This can be seen in various ways outside of his work. He was very superstitious about certain numbers -- for instance, he became utterly convinced that he would die at 61 or 62, because of a series of rather tenous coincidencies to do with odd things like hotel room numbers. This kind of thinking is the down side of the type of self-controlled personality that is obsessional enough to produce the astonishing volume of work that Freud did. In extreme cases it can lead to what is known as an obsessional neurosis, where the sufferer is driven by endless compulsive rituals, and becomes unable to function normally.

Freud was a great collector of antiques, fired by his earlier classical studies and his interest in ancient history. He accumulated vast numbers of antique statuettes and other artefacts that are still in display in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, which is now part of a Freud museum. They are crammed in all over the place, showing that he was not particularly interested in their artistic value, but more in the feeling of connection with the past that they gave him and the sheer pleasure of collecting them. His compulsive streak shows up again in the fact that he smoked cigars heavily nearly all his life and found it impossible to stop, even when he was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923 and realized that tabacco was doing him no good. It was not until he had a heart attack in 1930 that he finally gave up.

Title: Manchester United confident of even more lucrative shirt deal to replace AIG
Post by: Peter s Father In Law on January 23, 2009, 09:18:19 AM

Ronaldo is a hard-working guy and he's really worth the money paid for!

(waiting anxious for Germany to lose tonight having betted even my mad money)

(http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/8682/60221073iq0.png)Yeah Right!

Manchester United are confident they can negotiate an even more lucrative shirt sponsorship deal when their current arrangement with AIG ends next year.

By Rory Smith Last Updated: 7:34PM GMT 21 Jan 2009

(http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/4374/aig1243388cvs3.jpg)Parting company: AIG will not renew sponsorship deal with United

The US insurance giant, the recipient of an $85 billion government bail-out in September, revealed on Wednesday that they will not renew their contract when it expires after the 2009-10 season. United have already contacted dozens of blue chip companies, including the Indian finance and media giant Sahara, inviting them to tender an offer to replace AIG, who signed a £19 million annual tie-up in 2006. The club's chief executive, David Gill, admitted in November that he could envisage AIG not renewing the partnership because of the bail-out and United have been sure not to make the same mistake they did three years ago, when Vodafone announced they were pulling out with six months' notice.

Industry experts believe that, despite the global economic slump, United could hope to match Bayern Munich's arrangement with T-Mobile and Juventus's with Fiat, both thought to be worth around £22 million per season. They are expected to turn to the market of the Far East, as well as the Gulf and the Indian subcontinent, as they look to extend the United brand reach across the globe. Firms like Saudi Telecom, already a commercial partner of the club, are thought to have been targeted as United aim to put a deal in place as quickly as possible. Drew Barrand, of Sport Industry Group, said: "United are worth so much as a brand that the normal rules don't really apply. They hold all the aces in this situation. Their brand is so valuable that they will have no problems replacing AIG and could even receive compensation if they decide to end the sponsorship deal early. "They will look to the emerging markets where there is a strong attachment to the Premier League and plenty of companies who would love the prestige of being United's sponsors." A club spokesman said: "Even in the current climate companies have to advertise and AIG would testify to how helpful sponsoring Manchester United is to raising a company's profile. "We would hope the next arrangement would be at an even higher level than the previous one."

Manchester United are confident they can negotiate an even more lucrative shirt sponsorship deal when their current arrangement with AIG ends next year.

By Rory Smith Last Updated: 7:34PM GMT 21 Jan 2009

(http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/4374/aig1243388cvs3.jpg)Parting company: AIG will not renew sponsorship deal with United

The US insurance giant, the recipient of an $85 billion government bail-out in September, revealed on Wednesday that they will not renew their contract when it expires after the 2009-10 season. United have already contacted dozens of blue chip companies, including the Indian finance and media giant Sahara, inviting them to tender an offer to replace AIG, who signed a £19 million annual tie-up in 2006. The club's chief executive, David Gill, admitted in November that he could envisage AIG not renewing the partnership because of the bail-out and United have been sure not to make the same mistake they did three years ago, when Vodafone announced they were pulling out with six months' notice.

Industry experts believe that, despite the global economic slump, United could hope to match Bayern Munich's arrangement with T-Mobile and Juventus's with Fiat, both thought to be worth around £22 million per season. They are expected to turn to the market of the Far East, as well as the Gulf and the Indian subcontinent, as they look to extend the United brand reach across the globe. Firms like Saudi Telecom, already a commercial partner of the club, are thought to have been targeted as United aim to put a deal in place as quickly as possible. Drew Barrand, of Sport Industry Group, said: "United are worth so much as a brand that the normal rules don't really apply. They hold all the aces in this situation. Their brand is so valuable that they will have no problems replacing AIG and could even receive compensation if they decide to end the sponsorship deal early. "They will look to the emerging markets where there is a strong attachment to the Premier League and plenty of companies who would love the prestige of being United's sponsors." A club spokesman said: "Even in the current climate companies have to advertise and AIG would testify to how helpful sponsoring Manchester United is to raising a company's profile. "We would hope the next arrangement would be at an even higher level than the previous one."

By ROBERT MILLWARD, AP Soccer Writer Jan 19, 7:28 pm EST

It's not only AIG that's in crisis, Peter's - Man City itself is in crisis. Manchester City made an astounding bid to buy Kaka from AC Milan in a failed deal that could have damaged the sport's image at a time when many clubs and fans are in debt. Man City, one of the world's richest clubs after its August sale to an Abu Dhabi consortium, flexed its financial muscle with the reported $147 million bid for Kaka. Negotiations ended late Monday after the player decided to stay at the Italian club. "I'm worried that, as a game, it looks as if football has no worries and is immune from the world financial crisis," said Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the players' union in English football, the Professional Footballers' Association. "It's not a time for any industry to be spending in a cavalier fashion. There's a serious problem with the world and finance, perfectly illustrated by the banks that were doing well until suddenly there was cavalier spending. It's brought a lot of problems for ordinary people and we don't want that to happen in football."

(http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/8254/kaka1241044ccq1.jpg)Kaká

While Taylor acknowledges that such a star as Kaka should try and earn as much as he can, he says the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening. Milan also may be forced to reward Kaka's loyalty with higher wages and that might upset his teammates, among them Ronaldinho, Paolo Maldini and Andriy Shevchenko. Upset that Kaka might go, the Milan fans staged demonstrations, angry that he might leave for a club which has not won a major title since the 1976 League Cup, the third-tier competition in English soccer. City's last league title was in 1968, and 2 years later it won the European Cup Winners' Cup, a competition that no longer exists. The club has spent most of its history in the shadow of neighbor Manchester United, which has won 17 leagues titles, a record 11 FA Cups and three European Champions Cups.

Even the buyout by the Abu Dhabi United Group, owned by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, hasn't had an immediate effect. Although the club was able to break the British transfer record by hiring Robinho from Real Madrid for nearly $47 million — and he rewarded them with 11 league goals — City slumped into the relegation zone. The club is 11th in the standings, four points from last place and with little chance of reaching one of the top four Champions League spots. By contrast, Kaka helped Milan win the Champions League in 2005 and the team is currently third in Serie A, six points behind Inter Milan. At San Siro, he is a big fish in a big pool. At City, he would easily have been the biggest star, even with Robinho and fellow Brazilians Elano and Jo alongside. But how long will the Abu Dhabi United Group maintain its ownership of Man City if the club continues to go season after season without any trophies? Taylor doubts that overseas buyers are prepared for the long haul. "A lot of owners have got unlimited funds," Taylor said. ut they may well get disenchanted and we may find that the money they have put into the club may just be a loan that needs to be repaid. The club can’t live with that."

To date, it has been proposed that the superior cardiac protection provided by carvedilol is not a consequence of hemodynamic variances but rather is due to its additional antioxidant effects. Studies in animals suggest that antioxidant effects may be protective in myocardial ischemia and may help retard the progression of atherosclerosis. Carvedilol decreases nitric oxide, the chemical that causes endothelial dysfunction and apoptosis (programmed cell death). In addition, carvedilol decreases the expression of structural extracellular proteins, an effect that reverses cardiac remodeling.

Is there some kind of cohort or case-control study confirming this?

Well, gent, it is true that cohort and case-control methodologies are the main tools for analytical epidemiological research. This is not to say, though, that findings from both cohort and case-control studies always reflect true associations which can be universally generalized. Epidemiological research is, to a large extent, of an observational character as opposed to experimental research. One should not forget that observational epidemiological studies are subject to the influence of factors over which the investigators most often do not have full control, and that findings from these studies are less reliable than those of studies with an experimental research design. It is therefore imperative that findings from analytical epidemiological studies are critically scrutinized before any judgement of causality is made. Furthermore, findings from one single epidemiological study only exceptionally provide conclusive evidence of a causal relationship between exposure and disease.

Experimental research provides data from which firmer conclusions can be made as compared with epidemiological studies. In experimental research, investigators can manipulate one factor while controlling others, and the main research question can be broken down into subquestions with comparatively simple causal assumptions. Through repeated manipulation of one or more factors in a series of experiments concerned with subquestions, the main research question can be resolved. The experimental approach allows control of the effect of extraneous factors that may have an effect on the outcome under study, but are not under investigation. Such extraneous factors may, if not under control, distort the results of the research and lead to false conclusions about cause and effect. In biomedical research on human beings the randomized clinical trial is the closest option to experimental research methodology. Observational epidemiological research has the disadvantage that extraneous factors cannot be manipulated by the investigators. Although information of such extraneous factors is collected and quantitatively adjusted for when they are known to be present, findings from observational epidemiological studies are generally less conclusive than those from experimental studies because of the less strict control of extraneous factors.

Bradford Hill has listed nine aspects concerned with the association between exposure and disease which need to be considered. The first of these is the strength of the association. A strongly elevated relative risk is more likely to reflect a causal association than is a slightly or moderately increased risk. Consistency of findings across studies conducted with different methodologies and in different settings, is another aspect. A third characteristic is specificity, that the exposure causes a particular disease, e.g. the observation that cigarette smoking is associated with squamous cell carcinoma of the respiratory tract. An important condition is the Sequence of events: the potentially causative factor must precede the effect, which in this context is disease. The dose-response relationship, or biological gradient, is another aspect. For example, massive exposure to sunlight is more likely to cause melanoma in susceptible individuals than is little or moderate sunlight. Biological plausibility is an aspect which is important, but depends on the biological knowledge of the day. The association should be consistent with what is generally known about the occurrence of the disease, its natural history and pathophysiology, and should not conflict with this knowledge. The causal interpretation of an association is furthered if there is experimental evidence in support of it, for example if elimination of exposure reduces the incidence of the disease. The ninth aspect is analogy. For example, if a virus is shown to be oncogenic in animal studies, we are more prone to accept that the human papilloma virus may be the cause of cervical cancer in humans. In his essay on association and causation, Bradford Hill notes that " none of my nine viewpoints can bring indisputable evidence for or against the cause-and-effect hypothesis and none can be required as a sine qua non ". The challenge of assessing causation is one of many fascinating aspects of epidemiological research.

As early as August 1912, Jung had intimated a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-tones archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth psychology. This takes us to the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia. Pistis Sophia is an important Gnostic text. The five remaining copies, which scholars date c. 250­-300 AD, relate the Gnostic teachings of the transfigured Jesus to the assembled disciples (including his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Martha), when the risen Christ had accomplished 11 years speaking with his disciples. In it the complex structures and hierarchies of heaven familiar in Gnostic teachings are revealed. The female divinity of gnosticism is Sophia, a being with many aspects and names. She is sometimes identified with the Holy Ghost itself but, according to her various capacities, is also the Universal Mother, the Mother of the Living or Resplendent Mother, the Power on High, She-of-the-left-hand (as opposed to Christ, understood as her husband and he of the Right Hand), as the Luxurious One, the Womb, the Virgin, the Wife of the Male, the Revealer of Perfect Mysteries, the Saint Columba of the Spirit, the Heavenly Mother, the Wandering One, or Elena (that is, Selene, the Moon). She was envisaged as the Psyche of the world and the female aspect of Logos.

Jung has been called weird by many because of his interest in the occult. Freud, for instance, would write to Jung in response to his letter:

Jung: "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you... I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment."

Freud: "In matters of occultism I have grown humble since the great lesson Ferenczi's experiences gave me. I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall do so gladly, that you know. But my hubris has been shattered."

Yet, early on Freud himself dabbled in the Kabbala, the esoteric branch of Jewish mysticism. He belonged to a Jewish society called B'nai B'rith and enjoyed weekly games of taroc, a complicated and popular card game which some people think is based on Kabbala. The taroc deck varies in size, but it includes 22 trump cards from the tarot, which are rich in symbolic imagery. The symbolism on these cards may well have set Freud on the path towards his first ideas about the unconscious: it was at this time that he presented his first ideas about dream interpretation. This information has been largely suppresed, probably because it wasn't approved of in Freud's contemporary society, with its rising tide of fierce anti-semitism. Later Freud strongly disapproved in public of what he called 'the occult.'

By the way, in academic circles Freud was often seen as opinionated and rather peculiar so that much of his work was done in what he called 'splendid isolation,' just as it had been from boyhood. He obviously had outstanding intellect, but by his own admission, he had a rather neurotic, obsessive personality and could not imagine a life without work He wrote incessantly and much of his writing was done on his days off, or even after a busy day seeing his patients. Freud's obsessive personality meant that he was the kind of person who has to do everything meticulously and accurately and he liked to be in control. This can be seen in various ways outside of his work. He was very superstitious about certain numbers -- for instance, he became utterly convinced that he would die at 61 or 62, because of a series of rather tenous coincidencies to do with odd things like hotel room numbers. This kind of thinking is the down side of the type of self-controlled personality that is obsessional enough to produce the astonishing volume of work that Freud did. In extreme cases it can lead to what is known as an obsessional neurosis, where the sufferer is driven by endless compulsive rituals, and becomes unable to function normally.

Freud was a great collector of antiques, fired by his earlier classical studies and his interest in ancient history. He accumulated vast numbers of antique statuettes and other artefacts that are still in display in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, which is now part of a Freud museum. They are crammed in all over the place, showing that he was not particularly interested in their artistic value, but more in the feeling of connection with the past that they gave him and the sheer pleasure of collecting them. His compulsive streak shows up again in the fact that he smoked cigars heavily nearly all his life and found it impossible to stop, even when he was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923 and realized that tabacco was doing him no good. It was not until he had a heart attack in 1930 that he finally gave up.

Interesting, three_lotteries, did you find this information online or it's from some book?

Cristiano Ronaldo will have to pay Real Madrid €20 million if he does not join them next summer according to Sport. The Spanish site reports that the agent for the Portuguese winger, Jorge Mendes, signed a pre-contract agreement with former Real Madrid president, Ramon Calderon, whilst he was still in office. This deal is apparently worth €100m, and if Ronaldo does not join, then Sport reports that he will have to pay €20m, as he has broken the agreement. It seemed as though Ronaldo was going to join Madrid last summer, and even though he did stay at Manchester United, the rumours continue about a potential move for the Portuguese superstar.

(http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/1631/realmja7.jpg)

Calderon himself was at the centre of the chaos at the time and, if this is true, he must be frustrated that he will not be in office next summer to see the player finally arrive. For Ronaldo, this deal could well mean that he will have to try and convince Sir Alex Ferguson to sell him, else he will end up losing a substantial sum of money, which even such a well-paid played is likely to miss. The winger has been recognised as the best player in the world, winning the Ballon d’Or, however, it is thought that he wants a new challenge after winning just about everything possible with United. The English club would be incredibly reluctant to let go of him, and one saving grace for them could be the fact that Calderon has gone. If Florentino Perez wins the presidential elections, as is predicted at the moment, it is highly unlikely that he will want this deal to go through, not because he does not want Ronaldo, but because he will want to start a fresh. Perez will not want to cash in on a deal made by Calderon, and for that reason, Manchester United could be saved, although for how long is anybody's guess.

It's not only AIG that's in crisis, Peter's - Man City itself is in crisis. Manchester City made an astounding bid to buy Kaka from AC Milan in a failed deal that could have damaged the sport's image at a time when many clubs and fans are in debt. Man City, one of the world's richest clubs after its August sale to an Abu Dhabi consortium, flexed its financial muscle with the reported $147 million bid for Kaka. Negotiations ended late Monday after the player decided to stay at the Italian club. "I'm worried that, as a game, it looks as if football has no worries and is immune from the world financial crisis," said Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the players' union in English football, the Professional Footballers' Association. "It's not a time for any industry to be spending in a cavalier fashion. There's a serious problem with the world and finance, perfectly illustrated by the banks that were doing well until suddenly there was cavalier spending. It's brought a lot of problems for ordinary people and we don't want that to happen in football."

(http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/8254/kaka1241044ccq1.jpg)Kaká

While Taylor acknowledges that such a star as Kaka should try and earn as much as he can, he says the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening. Milan also may be forced to reward Kaka's loyalty with higher wages and that might upset his teammates, among them Ronaldinho, Paolo Maldini and Andriy Shevchenko. Upset that Kaka might go, the Milan fans staged demonstrations, angry that he might leave for a club which has not won a major title since the 1976 League Cup, the third-tier competition in English soccer. City's last league title was in 1968, and 2 years later it won the European Cup Winners' Cup, a competition that no longer exists. The club has spent most of its history in the shadow of neighbor Manchester United, which has won 17 leagues titles, a record 11 FA Cups and three European Champions Cups.

Even the buyout by the Abu Dhabi United Group, owned by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, hasn't had an immediate effect. Although the club was able to break the British transfer record by hiring Robinho from Real Madrid for nearly $47 million — and he rewarded them with 11 league goals — City slumped into the relegation zone. The club is 11th in the standings, four points from last place and with little chance of reaching one of the top four Champions League spots. By contrast, Kaka helped Milan win the Champions League in 2005 and the team is currently third in Serie A, six points behind Inter Milan. At San Siro, he is a big fish in a big pool. At City, he would easily have been the biggest star, even with Robinho and fellow Brazilians Elano and Jo alongside. But how long will the Abu Dhabi United Group maintain its ownership of Man City if the club continues to go season after season without any trophies? Taylor doubts that overseas buyers are prepared for the long haul. "A lot of owners have got unlimited funds," Taylor said. ut they may well get disenchanted and we may find that the money they have put into the club may just be a loan that needs to be repaid. The club can’t live with that."

Cristiano Ronaldo will have to pay Real Madrid €20 million if he does not join them next summer according to Sport. The Spanish site reports that the agent for the Portuguese winger, Jorge Mendes, signed a pre-contract agreement with former Real Madrid president, Ramon Calderon, whilst he was still in office. This deal is apparently worth €100m, and if Ronaldo does not join, then Sport reports that he will have to pay €20m, as he has broken the agreement. It seemed as though Ronaldo was going to join Madrid last summer, and even though he did stay at Manchester United, the rumours continue about a potential move for the Portuguese superstar.

(http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/1631/realmja7.jpg)

Calderon himself was at the centre of the chaos at the time and, if this is true, he must be frustrated that he will not be in office next summer to see the player finally arrive. For Ronaldo, this deal could well mean that he will have to try and convince Sir Alex Ferguson to sell him, else he will end up losing a substantial sum of money, which even such a well-paid played is likely to miss. The winger has been recognised as the best player in the world, winning the Ballon d’Or, however, it is thought that he wants a new challenge after winning just about everything possible with United. The English club would be incredibly reluctant to let go of him, and one saving grace for them could be the fact that Calderon has gone. If Florentino Perez wins the presidential elections, as is predicted at the moment, it is highly unlikely that he will want this deal to go through, not because he does not want Ronaldo, but because he will want to start a fresh. Perez will not want to cash in on a deal made by Calderon, and for that reason, Manchester United could be saved, although for how long is anybody's guess.

It's not only AIG that's in crisis, Peter's - Man City itself is in crisis. Manchester City made an astounding bid to buy Kaka from AC Milan in a failed deal that could have damaged the sport's image at a time when many clubs and fans are in debt. Man City, one of the world's richest clubs after its August sale to an Abu Dhabi consortium, flexed its financial muscle with the reported $147 million bid for Kaka. Negotiations ended late Monday after the player decided to stay at the Italian club. "I'm worried that, as a game, it looks as if football has no worries and is immune from the world financial crisis," said Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the players' union in English football, the Professional Footballers' Association. "It's not a time for any industry to be spending in a cavalier fashion. There's a serious problem with the world and finance, perfectly illustrated by the banks that were doing well until suddenly there was cavalier spending. It's brought a lot of problems for ordinary people and we don't want that to happen in football."

(http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/8254/kaka1241044ccq1.jpg)Kaká

While Taylor acknowledges that such a star as Kaka should try and earn as much as he can, he says the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening. Milan also may be forced to reward Kaka's loyalty with higher wages and that might upset his teammates, among them Ronaldinho, Paolo Maldini and Andriy Shevchenko. Upset that Kaka might go, the Milan fans staged demonstrations, angry that he might leave for a club which has not won a major title since the 1976 League Cup, the third-tier competition in English soccer. City's last league title was in 1968, and 2 years later it won the European Cup Winners' Cup, a competition that no longer exists. The club has spent most of its history in the shadow of neighbor Manchester United, which has won 17 leagues titles, a record 11 FA Cups and three European Champions Cups.

Even the buyout by the Abu Dhabi United Group, owned by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, hasn't had an immediate effect. Although the club was able to break the British transfer record by hiring Robinho from Real Madrid for nearly $47 million — and he rewarded them with 11 league goals — City slumped into the relegation zone. The club is 11th in the standings, four points from last place and with little chance of reaching one of the top four Champions League spots. By contrast, Kaka helped Milan win the Champions League in 2005 and the team is currently third in Serie A, six points behind Inter Milan. At San Siro, he is a big fish in a big pool. At City, he would easily have been the biggest star, even with Robinho and fellow Brazilians Elano and Jo alongside. But how long will the Abu Dhabi United Group maintain its ownership of Man City if the club continues to go season after season without any trophies? Taylor doubts that overseas buyers are prepared for the long haul. "A lot of owners have got unlimited funds," Taylor said. ut they may well get disenchanted and we may find that the money they have put into the club may just be a loan that needs to be repaid. The club can’t live with that."

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Spanish police arrested a man arriving at Barcelona's airport from Chile after determining that the cast on his fractured left leg was made of cocaine, the Interior Ministry said in a statement Friday. Police say the leg cast was made out of cocaine. The 66-year-old Chilean man had an actual fracture of two bones below the knee, but the police suspect that he, or accomplices, may have intentionally fractured it, so that the cocaine cast could be applied. The plan, police say, was to get past police controls because of the leg cast, meant to elicit sympathy, but also to have a real fracture in case police decided to X-ray it.

Police were scrutinizing passengers arriving on the flight late Wednesday from the Chilean capital, Santiago, when they became suspicious of the man. They quickly discovered cocaine hidden in his luggage, in a six-pack of beer and also in the aluminum legs of two stools he was transporting. Then they applied a substance to the cast, which showed that it was made of cocaine, the statement said. In all, police said they seized 4.8 kilograms (10.5 lb) of cocaine. The suspect, identified only by his initials J.S.P.F., was taken to hospital to have his leg properly treated. He remains there, under police guard, a police spokesman told CNN.

MADRID, Spain (CNN) -- Spanish police arrested a man arriving at Barcelona's airport from Chile after determining that the cast on his fractured left leg was made of cocaine, the Interior Ministry said in a statement Friday. Police say the leg cast was made out of cocaine. The 66-year-old Chilean man had an actual fracture of two bones below the knee, but the police suspect that he, or accomplices, may have intentionally fractured it, so that the cocaine cast could be applied. The plan, police say, was to get past police controls because of the leg cast, meant to elicit sympathy, but also to have a real fracture in case police decided to X-ray it.

Police were scrutinizing passengers arriving on the flight late Wednesday from the Chilean capital, Santiago, when they became suspicious of the man. They quickly discovered cocaine hidden in his luggage, in a six-pack of beer and also in the aluminum legs of two stools he was transporting. Then they applied a substance to the cast, which showed that it was made of cocaine, the statement said. In all, police said they seized 4.8 kilograms (10.5 lb) of cocaine. The suspect, identified only by his initials J.S.P.F., was taken to hospital to have his leg properly treated. He remains there, under police guard, a police spokesman told CNN.

I would tend to believe the Spanish police has some kind of inside info (tip) on which they acted upon... This man displayed an open fracture of the tibia and the fibula, but the investigators examined the possibility that the injuries were brought about voluntarily... to facilitate trafficking through security checks.

The Spanish police is particularly wary about so-called "hot flights" from South America and had their suspicions about this man, which proved to be well-founded. He had 4.85 kilogrammes (10.7 pounds) of cocaine stuffed in the cans, the stools and forming his would-be "cast." Spain is one of Europe's main points of transit for cocaine from South America, mostly from its former colony Colombia.

I would tend to believe the Spanish police has some kind of inside info (tip) on which they acted upon... This man displayed an open fracture of the tibia and the fibula, but the investigators examined the possibility that the injuries were brought about voluntarily... to facilitate trafficking through security checks.

The Spanish police is particularly wary about so-called "hot flights" from South America and had their suspicions about this man, which proved to be well-founded. He had 4.85 kg (10.7 pounds) of cocaine stuffed in the cans, the stools and forming his would-be "cast." Spain is one of Europe's main points of transit for cocaine from South America, mostly from its former colony Colombia.

So basically it was sorta "profiling" kind of thing, rather than some specific tip acted on?

"Gaying" him just because he's stretching Ronaldo? I mean, that's part of the training thing they're supposed to do.. employing this kind of "logic" the guy sitting next to you whose leg accidently touches yours has to be gay!

Jung has been called weird by many because of his interest in the occult. Freud, for instance, would write to Jung in response to his letter:

Jung: "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you... I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment."

Freud: "In matters of occultism I have grown humble since the great lesson Ferenczi's experiences gave me. I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall do so gladly, that you know. But my hubris has been shattered."

Yet, early on Freud himself dabbled in the Kabbala, the esoteric branch of Jewish mysticism. He belonged to a Jewish society called B'nai B'rith and enjoyed weekly games of taroc, a complicated and popular card game which some people think is based on Kabbala. The taroc deck varies in size, but it includes 22 trump cards from the tarot, which are rich in symbolic imagery. The symbolism on these cards may well have set Freud on the path towards his first ideas about the unconscious: it was at this time that he presented his first ideas about dream interpretation. This information has been largely suppresed, probably because it wasn't approved of in Freud's contemporary society, with its rising tide of fierce anti-semitism. Later Freud strongly disapproved in public of what he called 'the occult.'

By the way, in academic circles Freud was often seen as opinionated and rather peculiar so that much of his work was done in what he called 'splendid isolation,' just as it had been from boyhood. He obviously had outstanding intellect, but by his own admission, he had a rather neurotic, obsessive personality and could not imagine a life without work He wrote incessantly and much of his writing was done on his days off, or even after a busy day seeing his patients. Freud's obsessive personality meant that he was the kind of person who has to do everything meticulously and accurately and he liked to be in control. This can be seen in various ways outside of his work. He was very superstitious about certain numbers -- for instance, he became utterly convinced that he would die at 61 or 62, because of a series of rather tenous coincidencies to do with odd things like hotel room numbers. This kind of thinking is the down side of the type of self-controlled personality that is obsessional enough to produce the astonishing volume of work that Freud did. In extreme cases it can lead to what is known as an obsessional neurosis, where the sufferer is driven by endless compulsive rituals, and becomes unable to function normally.

Freud was a great collector of antiques, fired by his earlier classical studies and his interest in ancient history. He accumulated vast numbers of antique statuettes and other artefacts that are still in display in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, which is now part of a Freud museum. They are crammed in all over the place, showing that he was not particularly interested in their artistic value, but more in the feeling of connection with the past that they gave him and the sheer pleasure of collecting them. His compulsive streak shows up again in the fact that he smoked cigars heavily nearly all his life and found it impossible to stop, even when he was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923 and realized that tabacco was doing him no good. It was not until he had a heart attack in 1930 that he finally gave up.

Interesting, three_lotteries, did you find this information online or it's from some book?

Definitely, Nico_Landi, 3 lotteries's post has been extracted from a book - I don't remember its title right now, but I remember very well having it read!

Manchester United are confident they can negotiate an even more lucrative shirt sponsorship deal when their current arrangement with AIG ends next year.

By Rory Smith Last Updated: 7:34PM GMT 21 Jan 2009

(http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/4374/aig1243388cvs3.jpg)Parting company: AIG will not renew sponsorship deal with United

The US insurance giant, the recipient of an $85 billion government bail-out in September, revealed on Wednesday that they will not renew their contract when it expires after the 2009-10 season. United have already contacted dozens of blue chip companies, including the Indian finance and media giant Sahara, inviting them to tender an offer to replace AIG, who signed a £19 million annual tie-up in 2006. The club's chief executive, David Gill, admitted in November that he could envisage AIG not renewing the partnership because of the bail-out and United have been sure not to make the same mistake they did three years ago, when Vodafone announced they were pulling out with six months' notice.

Industry experts believe that, despite the global economic slump, United could hope to match Bayern Munich's arrangement with T-Mobile and Juventus's with Fiat, both thought to be worth around £22 million per season. They are expected to turn to the market of the Far East, as well as the Gulf and the Indian subcontinent, as they look to extend the United brand reach across the globe. Firms like Saudi Telecom, already a commercial partner of the club, are thought to have been targeted as United aim to put a deal in place as quickly as possible. Drew Barrand, of Sport Industry Group, said: "United are worth so much as a brand that the normal rules don't really apply. They hold all the aces in this situation. Their brand is so valuable that they will have no problems replacing AIG and could even receive compensation if they decide to end the sponsorship deal early. "They will look to the emerging markets where there is a strong attachment to the Premier League and plenty of companies who would love the prestige of being United's sponsors." A club spokesman said: "Even in the current climate companies have to advertise and AIG would testify to how helpful sponsoring Manchester United is to raising a company's profile. "We would hope the next arrangement would be at an even higher level than the previous one."

Don't get me started with AIG! So disgusting are the actions of AIG's execs that this GOP Senator called for them to do sumthin!

In an interview with Cedar Rapids, Iowa, radio station WMT-AM today, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said executives of AIG should consider following what he described of the Japanese model of shamed corporate executives: apology or suicide. "I don't know whether the ($165 million in bonuses) is an issue as much as just the chutzpah of the people running AIG," Grassley said. "That they could thumb their nose at the taxpayers, it's more that. The attitude of these corporate executives and bank executives, and most of them are in New York, that somehow they're not responsible for their company going into the tank," he said."I suggest, you know, obviously maybe they ought to be removed, but I would suggest that the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them [is] if they would follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I'm sorry and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide." Grassley added, "In the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology."

In a Tuesday morning conference call, Grassley told reporters, according to the AP, that "what I'm expressing here obviously is not that I want people to commit suicide. That's not my notion. But I do feel very strongly that we have not had statements of apology, statements of remorse, statements of contrition on the part of CEOs of manufacturing companies or banks or financial services or insurance companies that are asking for bailouts." Last October, Grassley invoked the Japanese model a little less harshly. "I've suggested it wouldn't be a bad thing that the leadership of these institutions would take a Japanese-style approach to corporate governance," he said then. "And I'm not talking about going out and committing suicide as some Japanese do in these circumstances, but I am talking about scenes I've seen on television where in belly-up corporations the CEOs go before the board of directors, before the public, before the stockholders and bow deeply and apologize for their mismanagement. Something like that happening among Wall Street executives would go a long way toward satisfying my constituents and many Americans that help might be needed and would more gracefully be given by the taxpayers of this county." And responding to the news that Wall Street bankers gave themselves $18.4 billion worth of bonuses in 2008, Grassley told the New York Times' Maureen Dowd at the end of January that the executives "ought to give 'em back or we should go get 'em. If this were Japan and a corporate executive did what is being done on Wall Street, they'd either go out and commit suicide or go before the board of directors and the country and take a very deep bow and apologize."

It's not only AIG that's in crisis, Peter's - Man City itself is in crisis. Manchester City made an astounding bid to buy Kaka from AC Milan in a failed deal that could have damaged the sport's image at a time when many clubs and fans are in debt. Man City, one of the world's richest clubs after its August sale to an Abu Dhabi consortium, flexed its financial muscle with the reported $147 million bid for Kaka. Negotiations ended late Monday after the player decided to stay at the Italian club. "I'm worried that, as a game, it looks as if football has no worries and is immune from the world financial crisis," said Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the players' union in English football, the Professional Footballers' Association. "It's not a time for any industry to be spending in a cavalier fashion. There's a serious problem with the world and finance, perfectly illustrated by the banks that were doing well until suddenly there was cavalier spending. It's brought a lot of problems for ordinary people and we don't want that to happen in football."

(http://img519.imageshack.us/img519/8254/kaka1241044ccq1.jpg)Kaká

While Taylor acknowledges that such a star as Kaka should try and earn as much as he can, he says the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening. Milan also may be forced to reward Kaka's loyalty with higher wages and that might upset his teammates, among them Ronaldinho, Paolo Maldini and Andriy Shevchenko. Upset that Kaka might go, the Milan fans staged demonstrations, angry that he might leave for a club which has not won a major title since the 1976 League Cup, the third-tier competition in English soccer. City's last league title was in 1968, and 2 years later it won the European Cup Winners' Cup, a competition that no longer exists. The club has spent most of its history in the shadow of neighbor Manchester United, which has won 17 leagues titles, a record 11 FA Cups and three European Champions Cups.

Even the buyout by the Abu Dhabi United Group, owned by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, hasn't had an immediate effect. Although the club was able to break the British transfer record by hiring Robinho from Real Madrid for nearly $47 million — and he rewarded them with 11 league goals — City slumped into the relegation zone. The club is 11th in the standings, four points from last place and with little chance of reaching one of the top four Champions League spots. By contrast, Kaka helped Milan win the Champions League in 2005 and the team is currently third in Serie A, six points behind Inter Milan. At San Siro, he is a big fish in a big pool. At City, he would easily have been the biggest star, even with Robinho and fellow Brazilians Elano and Jo alongside. But how long will the Abu Dhabi United Group maintain its ownership of Man City if the club continues to go season after season without any trophies? Taylor doubts that overseas buyers are prepared for the long haul. "A lot of owners have got unlimited funds," Taylor said. ut they may well get disenchanted and we may find that the money they have put into the club may just be a loan that needs to be repaid. The club can’t live with that."

From the cover of Spanish sports daily 'Marca' comes a report that could shake both AC Milan and Real Madrid to their foundations...

Real Madrid president-in-waiting Florentino Perez has already sealed an agreement with AC Milan to allow star midfielder Kaka to join up with the Blancos next season, according to Marca. The Madrid-based sports daily claims that Perez, who is set to win the upcoming presidential elections at the Santiago Bernabeu, agreed with Milan vice-president Adriano Galliani to sign the Brazilian during a meeting on March 16. The fee involved will be a colossal €60 million, payable over the next four years - the flagship expenditure of Perez's election campaign, which will begin in earnest in three weeks. Missing from the accord is Kaka himself, whose own economic matters have apparently yet to be settled. However, according to Marca, these will be a mere formality as the Milan agreement was the sticking point.

So confident is the newspaper of this transfer's fruition that the front page currently displays Zinedine Zidane - a well-known Perez ally - handing his old No. 5 shirt to a smiling Kaka. This mock-up photo is to illustrate the fact that the past Ballon d'Or winner is to seek his second World Player of the Year victory wearing the same number that saw the outgoing Fabio Cannavaro lift the award in 2006. Despite the jubilation in Spain, though, it appears as though this transfer saga is far from complete. Adriano Galliani has moved to scotch the rumours, telling La Gazzetta dello Sport this morning, "Florentino Perez and I have set up the G14 and our rapport goes beyond football. That's why I don't want to stir up any controversies and I am very calm. Perez has yet to be re-elected as president at Real and can’t make any commitments." "However, I am sure that if he really wanted to buy Kaka one day, he would come directly to me, without beating around the bush. "Therefore, I am calm: Kaka is not for sale and Florentino will make his peace with it."

From the cover of Spanish sports daily 'Marca' comes a report that could shake both AC Milan and Real Madrid to their foundations...

Real Madrid president-in-waiting Florentino Perez has already sealed an agreement with AC Milan to allow star midfielder Kaka to join up with the Blancos next season, according to Marca. The Madrid-based sports daily claims that Perez, who is set to win the upcoming presidential elections at the Santiago Bernabeu, agreed with Milan vice-president Adriano Galliani to sign the Brazilian during a meeting on March 16. The fee involved will be a colossal €60 million, payable over the next four years - the flagship expenditure of Perez's election campaign, which will begin in earnest in three weeks. Missing from the accord is Kaka himself, whose own economic matters have apparently yet to be settled. However, according to Marca, these will be a mere formality as the Milan agreement was the sticking point.

So confident is the newspaper of this transfer's fruition that the front page currently displays Zinedine Zidane - a well-known Perez ally - handing his old No. 5 shirt to a smiling Kaka. This mock-up photo is to illustrate the fact that the past Ballon d'Or winner is to seek his second World Player of the Year victory wearing the same number that saw the outgoing Fabio Cannavaro lift the award in 2006. Despite the jubilation in Spain, though, it appears as though this transfer saga is far from complete. Adriano Galliani has moved to scotch the rumours, telling La Gazzetta dello Sport this morning, "Florentino Perez and I have set up the G14 and our rapport goes beyond football. That's why I don't want to stir up any controversies and I am very calm. Perez has yet to be re-elected as president at Real and can’t make any commitments." "However, I am sure that if he really wanted to buy Kaka one day, he would come directly to me, without beating around the bush. "Therefore, I am calm: Kaka is not for sale and Florentino will make his peace with it."

Ewan Macdonald & Vince Masiello, Goal.com

I guess they're just rumours - they're so old you just can't believe them. Take a look here, for instance:

Just imagine the guy taking a dump in a bag to be able to transport it to his superior's place of work! The entire house will smell great! Let's hope he'll do it some place else, on his way to work, in a nearby hotel or something like that!

mayo, do you really think "nearby hotels" are supposed to be your personal bathroom?

[...] Vitruvius developed the concept of 'squaring the circle' which basically involves constructing a square with an equal surface area to a circle or visa-versa. DaVinci was fascinated by the ideas that Vitruvius had about squaring the circle. DaVinci's drawing contains both a square and a circle with unequal surface areas. There are clues within the drawing that can be used to 'square the circle' and 'circle the square' [...]

The ultimate desire of mankind is to identify wholeness, to grasp the essence of being, to be integrated with the harmony, perfection, patterns, and cycles of the material, metaphorical and metaphysical worlds. This desire motivates us to explore the realms of fact and fancy, logic and metaphor, reason and emotion, to capture the whole of being in one part, to see it, hear it, feel it, and enjoy it in everyday life. The circle is an object of nature, an idealization of pure mathematics, and a symbol or framework we use to understand and describe our world. The circle exists independently of human thought, as ripples in a pond, or the appearance of the sun and moon, or the shape of the iris of an eye. In mathematics, we choose to define a circle as the places at a constant distance from a center, usually in two dimensions.

The Yin-Yang symbol of two parts spiraling within a circle is a traditional icon of Confucianism and Taoism. It suggests movement around the inside of the circle. It also provides a paradigm of polarity with which to view the dynamics of everyday life. As a symbol, it can be as personal and internal as a heart, which gives and receives blood through each complete cycle. It can also be as general and external as the cycles of day and night.

The Buddhist circular mandala designs have been used continuously for millennia. "A mandala (Sanskrit for "circle") is a symbolic diagram of the universe, arranged in circles, used in tantric Buddhism. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung considered the mandala to be a universally occurring pattern associated with the mythological representation of the self.

Zoroastrianism, the tradition of ancient Persia, is believed by scholars to have been influential in the later development of metaphysical concepts in Abrahamic and Eastern religious beliefs. Its influence survives to our own day, not only in central Asia, but in such products of the European post-Romantic movement as Richard Strauss's music and Friedrich Nietzsche's book, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." Modern historians have dated the time of Zoroaster to approximately 1750 BC. Also known as Zarathustra, he was the founder of the Zoroastrian tradition. One symbol of Zoroastrianism is the Fra-vahar, a figure that stands for the ideal moral and spiritual focus in life. Fra is the direction, forward, and vahar describes a pulling force. Of the two circles in the figure, the ring in the hand is a reminder that we are bound to keep our promises or agreements with others. The other circle, at the waist, reminds us that our spirits live on, in essence immortal, and so also symbolizes infinity.

The circle has represented the divine, as well as the universe and groups of people in it.

Quote

Isaiah said:

"To whom then will ye liken God?or what likeness will ye compare unto him? ...Have ye not known? have ye not heard?hath it not been told you from the beginning?have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth,and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; ..."

A saying derived from words attributed to Empedocles suggests the ancient Greeks may have also thought of these connections:

The nature of God is a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere.

The Greeks tried to explain the world, from the mystical to the scientific. The Pythagoreans developed geometrical relations for much of the world around them, but found the apparently simple circle to be a serious challenge. The Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks recognized that the ratio of a circle's circumference or periphery to its diameter was a constant, found to be about 3.14, which we call p (pi). The Pythagorean Greeks hoped to use geometry to relate the areas of the figures of a circle and a square, or "to square a circle" using a compass and straight edge. Johann H. Lambert, the great 18-century logician, was the first to demonstrate the irrationality of p. Beyond the classification of real numbers into rational and irrational numbers, the irrationals can also be classified as either algebraic or transcendental. A number is said to be algebraic if it can be the root of a finite polynomial equation with integer coefficients not all zero. A real number that is not algebraic is called transcendental. In 1882, the German mathematician Ferdinand Lindemann finally proved that p is a transcendental number. This settled the question of squaring the circle, since only algebraic dimensions can be constructed by using a compass and straight edge.

The Pythagoreans developed a method to represent the area of a circle by dividing it up into an infinite number of pie slices, which are essentially infinitely narrow triangles, as high as the circle's radius. This gives the area by applying the simple formula for triangles. However, this converts the problem of the circle into the problem of infinity. Zeno confronted the Pythagoreans by asking if a slice of pie with a curved base can be represented with a flat-edged triangle before it is infinitely thin, and if the triangle is infinitely thin, then how can a real area be described by a collection of "nothing." The Greek search for mathematical rigor faced a daunting paradox.

(http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/1264/4triangl.gif)The circle as the sum of an infinite number of small perfect triangles. The smaller the triangles that are inscribed within a circle, the more nearly they fill it up, shown in the diminishing shaded areas above. Moreover, as these triangles shrink, their height (dotted line) gets closer to the length of the radius...

Different cultures throughout history have associated the square with the tangible world, and the circle with the perfect, ideal or the divine universe. The Pythagoreans and Plato associated the five regular Platonic solids with the four ancient elements of Empedocles, where earth is thought of as the cube, in the sense that one lives within one's own four walls. Similarly, fire is the tetrahedron, and the almost-spherical dodecahedron represents the universe. This is illustrated in the figure below, from Johannes Kepler's Harmonices Mundi, Book II (1619).

Perhaps because the circle couldn't be squared mathematically, it was intriguing to do it visually. Leonardo DaVinci fit the proportions of the limbs of a human body into a circle and a square. Leonardo was illustrating the "ideal" proportions of human limbs relative to body size.

(http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/3930/6leonard.jpg)Leonardo DaVinci's man in a circle and a square

Title: The Scandal of Geometry
Post by: Meeting of Minds on May 09, 2009, 06:56:48 AM

The circle is an idealized object, the fundamental ultimate in perfection. In Euclid's geometry, the circle is the only geometrical area that appears in a fundamental postulate. Euclid constructed his geometry based on 5 postulates. 4 of Euclid's 5 basic postulates seem trivial enough to be considered as axioms. However, the 5th one, the parallel postulate, from the very beginning was considered as insufficiently plausible to qualify as an unproved assumption by mathematicians. For 2000 years, mathematicians unsuccessfully tried to derive it from the other 4 postulates, or to replace it with another more self-evident one. Euclid himself did not quite trust this postulate. He postponed using it in a proof for as long as possible, until his 29th proposition. A modified version of this postulate (equivalent to the original one) is as follows:

For every line l and for every point p that does not lie on l there exists a unique line m through p that is parallel to l.

To make Euclid's geometry rigorous, many larger systems of axioms have been proposed. The one proposed by David Hilbert was not the first, but was the closest in spirit to Euclid's. Today, a system of geometry without a form of the parallel postulate is called the neutral geometry. The discovery of non-Euclidean geometry occurred in the 19th century with the works of János Bolyai and N. I. Lobachevsky. (There is evidence that Gauss also discovered some of the non-Euclidean results, but did not publish them.) One of the most prominent non-Euclidean geometries is Hyperbolic geometry, which comes from the neutral geometry combined with the Hyperbolic Postulate:

For every line l and point p not on l there exist at least 2 distinct lines parallel to l that pass through p.

We can prove, in this geometry, that the sum of the angles of any triangle is strictly less than 180o (p). Interestingly, a direct relationship between hyperbolic geometry and Einstein's special theory of relativity was discovered by the physicist Arnold Sommerfeld in 1909, and elucidated by the geometer Vladimir Varichak in 1912. Since a star's gravity bends light toward itself, a triangle formed by light rays between three stars has this geometry. So, in some ways, this non-Euclidean geometry is a better description of the real interstellar universe than our traditional Euclidean geometry.

(http://img11.imageshack.us/img11/6599/73lines.gif)Light rays bend between stars, as do lines in hyperbolic geometry.

To explore hyperbolic geometry, Eugenio Beltrami constructed an explicit model in 1866. This model, now known as the Klein model, represents n-dimensional hyperbolic space by an open ball in Euclidean space, and represents hyperbolic lines by Euclidean straight-line segments in the ball.

Another model was invented by Poincaré. His geometric model is conformal, which means it preserves angles. The two-dimensional model maps the hyperbolic plane of all space onto a unit-radius size disk. Here, hyperbolic lines are represented by arcs of circles perpendicular to the bounding circle of the unit disk. As everything in this model is inside the unit disk, its circumference represents infinity, and outside the boundary circle there is absolutely nothing. To understand the Poincaré model, consider that you are in the center of such a circular world, and want to walk away toward the boundary circle at infinity. From your local perspective, each step you take is the same size. But from the point of view of an observer outside this plane, the first step is followed by successively smaller steps. Your steps get progressively smaller, to the observer's eye, by the ratio of (1-r2)/2, where r is your distance from the origin in this model.

Let us see what we can do in this circular world that we cannot do in our world of apparently Euclidean geometry. Consider that we want to cover a Euclidean surface with some simple type of regular polygon, without any gaps or overlaps. We see that an equilateral triangle can cover a surface, as can a square, or a regular hexagon. But no other regular polygons can do this. The reason is that if p is the number of sides of a regular polygon (call it a p-gon), and q is the number of p-gons around a vertex, then the interior angle of each p-gon is (p-2)p/p, and around each vertex we have the sum of angles q(p-2)p/p = 2p to make a circle. This reduces to (p-2)(q-2) = 4. Thus, for the 3-gon (triangle) we have q = 6, for the 4-gon q = 4, for the 6-gon q = 3, and no other regular polygon covers a surface by itself. However, this is not the case in the hyperbolic plane. Here, the sum of the angles of a triangle is always less than p. Following the same analysis, this makes (p-2)(q-2) > 4. So we are able to cover a hyperbolic plane by other regular p-gons such as pentagons. Here, we have four regular pentagons fitting exactly around each vertex in this non-Euclidean space.

(http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/1659/9poincar.gif)Tiling of a hyperbolic plane by pentagons with regular angles

The relationships between Euclidean and hyperbolic geometries can be seen by comparing two images that treat a single theme using these geometries. This could be seen in two patterns of fall leaves, shown in the two other figures. It can also be seen by comparing two similar works by M. C. Escher, showing alternating angels and devils. The Euclidean pattern is just a piece of the whole, which could be extended infinitely. In contrast, the non-Euclidean pattern presents the entire world of angels and devils, bounded by a circle.

(http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/662/10euleafb.gif)Fall Leaves, by Jill Ethridge. Another example of Euclidean tessellation is Escher's Angel-Devil Symmetry Drawing E 45, from 1941, on the Euclidean plane

(http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/3484/11hyleafo.gif)Hyperbolic Fall Leaves, by Douglas Dunham (published with the kind permition of the author). Another example of hyperbolic tessellation is Escher's non-Euclidean Angel-Devil pattern from 1960, Circle Limit IV, that fills the unit circle to infinity, covering the entire hyperbolic plane.

Title: The Kissing Number
Post by: Meeting of Minds on May 09, 2009, 07:21:07 AM

An interesting measure of the size of a circle is the possible number of neighboring circles. One can place circles in a rectangular grid, with identical circles touching above, below, to the left, and to the right of the central circle. However, a tighter arrangement can be made, with hexagonal symmetry. Here, each circle is surrounded by six equivalent ones. This arrangement has the special property that all the neighbors are touching two other circles off the original one. In other words, six circles will exactly surround one, in two dimensions. Items forced on to a flat surface, if short on space, will get six neighbors, and tend to take on the shapes of hexagons themselves, as in a honeycomb.

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/13544/18kiss2d.gif)A circle encircled by six circles shows the kissing number in two dimensions.

Another example of the kissing number in a plane is carbon atoms in graphite, as in pencil "lead". Here, layers are made of carbon atoms forming three bonds in the plane to similar atoms. The atoms form flat hexagonal rings, which are surrounded by identical hexagons.

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/13545/19grapht.gif)Carbon atoms in two dimensions form hexagonal sheets, called graphite.

While carbon in the graphite form is essentially a two-dimensional structure, the diamond form of carbon is a covalent network solid, extending equally in three dimensions.

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/13546/20diamon.gif)Carbon atoms in diamond extend through three dimensions.

In the last few years, a third fundamental form of the element carbon has been discovered, in which individual atomic bonds are made in two dimensions, but the overall shape obtained is three dimensional. Specifically, a group of 60 carbon atoms will wrap itself into a sphere (changing some hexagons into pentagons). This forms a compound called buckminsterfullerene, or a buckyball. This is named after the inventor of the similarly shaped geodesic dome, Buckminster Fuller.

(http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/1056/22buckyb.gif)A buckyball, or buckminsterfullerene, the spherical C60 form of pure carbon atoms, Registry number [99685-96-8], in the Chemical Abstracts Service

The problem of stacking or packing balls efficiently has been an interesting puzzle for four centuries. While people have stacked things for millennia, it was in 1611 that Kepler posed the Sphere-Packing Problem [19]. What kind of stacking of spheres can be proven to be the densest possible?

A first layer of spheres can be arranged in the rectangular or hexagonal patterns of circles in a plane, described above. Such layers can be stacked exactly atop one another, yielding respectively the arrangements called the body-centered (or 3-dimensional) cubic lattice, and the face-centered cubic lattice or cubic close-packed form. However, if flat layers are stacked repeatedly in a staggered way, a third, most dense pattern emerges, called the hexagonal lattice, or hexagonal close-packed

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/13552/21kiss3d.gif)Oranges or atoms in three dimensions will stack in these three arrangements.

All three of these packings are found in nature, as are mixtures of these with less regular forms. Interestingly, elemental metals use all forms, in patterns that do not always correlate with electronic symmetry. For example, potassium, chromium and tungsten prefer the body-centered cubic form, as does iron at room temperature. However, iron at other temperatures takes on the cubic close-packed form, as do copper, silver, and gold. In contrast, the elements in the same period directly below iron (i.e., ruthenium and osmium) prefer the hexagonal close-packed arrangement, as do most of the rare-earth elements, as well as zinc and titanium.

The number of circles that can surround a circle in any given dimension is called the "kissing number" by mathematicians. On a one-dimensional line, this is two (left and right). In a two-dimensional plane, as we discussed, the kissing number is six. The kissing number is 12 in three dimensions, as in the above hexagonal close-packed arrangement (with six in the plane, three more above, and three others below). In theory, a four-dimensional sphere should have a kissing number of 24, in eight dimensions it is 240, and in 24-dimensional space the kissing number is 196,560 circles touching the center circle at once. The kissing number of 6 for a circle means that it is possible to construct a regular hexagon (and consequently a six-pointed star) by using the radius to cut the circle into six equal arcs. Unlike the simplicity of the construction of a six-pointed star, it is a challenge to use only a compass and straight edge to construct a pentagram, a five-pointed star extending from a regular pentagon. To do this task, we need to know how to find the "Golden Mean" of a line segment. The Golden Mean is a cut in a line segment such that the ratio of the larger section to the smaller one is the same as the ratio of the entire line segment to the larger one. It is possible to find the Golden Mean of a given line segment using a compass and straight edge. The Golden Mean has been used extensively in art and architecture from the ancient times of the Egyptians and Greeks up to today. The larger section of the Golden Mean of the radius of any circle divides the circle into ten equal arcs, which enables us to construct the pentagram. The complexity of these procedures, or the harmony and order of the completed form, created the association of mysticism with the combination of a pentagram inscribed in a circle, the chosen symbol of the order of the Pythagoreans, sometimes associated in western tradition with witchcraft

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/13550/23pentgm.gif)The pentagram of the Pythagoreans

Not all references to the circle are benign. Dante Alighieri, in the Inferno, from his La Divina Commedia, described the circles of Hell. For two centuries, the dark side of the search for knowledge has been associated with Goethe's Faust. In one scene, a witch draws a circle to cast a spell:

Quote

Mephistopheles [to Faust]: My friend, learn well and understand, This is the way to take a witch in hand.

The Witch: Now, gentlemen, what say you I shall do?

Mephistopheles: A good glass of the well-known juice, Yet I must beg the oldest sort of you. A double strength do years produce.

The Witch: With pleasure! Here I have a bottle From which I sometimes wet my throttle, Which has no more the slightest stink; I'll gladly give a little glass to you.

[In a low tone.]

And yet this man, if unprepared he drink, He can not live an hour, as you know too.

Mephistopheles: He is a friend of mine whom it will profit well; I would bestow your kitchen's best on him. So draw your circle, speak your spell, Give him a cup full to the brim!

[The Witch with curious gestures draws a circle and places marvelous things in it; meanwhile the glasses begin to ring, the cauldron to sound and make music. Lastly, she brings a large book and places the Apes in a circle so as to make them serve as reading-desk and hold the torch. She beckons Faust to come near her.]

Faust [to Mephistopheles]: What is to come of all this? Say! These frantic gestures and this crazy stuff? This most insipid, fooling play, I've known and hated it enough.

Mephistopheles: Nonsense! She only wants to joke us; I beg you, do not be so stern a man! Physician-like, she has to play some hocus-pocus So that the juice will do you all the good it can. [He obliges Faust to step into the circle.]

While European witchcraft has often been associated with circles, the circle is used for good magic in a tale from the Grimm brothers:

Quote

When the miller got home, his wife said, "Tell me, from whence comes this sudden wealth into our house?" He answered, "It comes from a stranger who promised me great treasure. I, in return, have promised him what stands behind the mill; we can very well give him the big apple-tree for it." "Ah, husband," said the terrified wife, "that must have been the devil! He did not mean the apple-tree, but our daughter, who was standing behind the mill sweeping the yard."

The miller's daughter was a beautiful, pious girl, and lived through the three years in the fear of God and without sin. When therefore the time was over, and the day came when the Evil-one was to fetch her, she washed herself clean, and made a circle round herself with chalk. The devil appeared quite early, but he could not come near to her.

Circling Back to Idealism

Just as did the ancient Greeks, the philosophers of the seventeenth century used the circle as an example of mathematical idealization, to distinguish between an idea and an actual item. Consider that, in 1690, Locke wrote the following:

Quote

Hence the reality of mathematical knowledge.... The mathematician considers the truth and properties belonging to a rectangle or circle only as they are an idea in his own mind. For it is possible he never found either of them existing mathematically, i.e., precisely true, in his life. But yet the knowledge he has of any truths or properties belonging to a circle, or any other mathematical figure, are nevertheless true and certain, even of real things existing: because real things are no further concerned, nor intended to be meant by any such propositions, than as things really agree to those archetypes in his mind.

Although the mathematically pure circle doesn’t exist in the tangible world, it is present in aspects of many parts of life, as Walt Whitman wrote in Leaves of Grass:

Quote

Facing west from California's shores, Inquiring, tireless, seeking what is yet unfound, I, a child, very old, over waves, towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations, look afar, Look off the shores of my Western sea, the circle almost circled; For starting westward from Hindustan, from the vales of Kashmere, From Asia, from the north, from the God, the sage, and the hero, From the south, from the flowery peninsulas and the spice islands, Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd, Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous, (But where is what I started for so long ago? And why is it yet unfound?)

To us, the poet here is seeing circles in many aspects of life. He is connecting the end and the beginning of his own travels, of his lifetime, of geographical longitudes, and of the spread of human migration and cultural diversity. He is commenting on his own aspirations and those of all people. The goals and activities of life do not always go forward in a straight line, but can circle one back to the start. Whitman’s poem interweaves many of the ideas we see connected to circles. The philosophy of living in harmony with circular patterns was expressed more recently by Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa, 1863-1950), a holy man of the Oglala Sioux Native Americans.

Quote

Everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the power of the world always works in circles, and everything tries to be round. In the old days when we were a strong and happy people, all our power came to us from the sacred hoop of the nation, and so long as the hoop was unbroken the people flourished....Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle....

Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood and so it is in everything where power moves. Our teepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle, the nation’s hoop, a nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.

The circle has been used throughout history, and is still incorporated into new works, such as this feathered snake eating itself

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/13553/26snaket.gif)A dragon/feathered-snake eating itself, as a mixture of the old cultures of China, Ireland, and Mexico, by Jorge Carrera Bolaños

The circle remains an intimate part of human culture, from math and science to art and human views of the world. Edwin Markham (1852-1940) expressed this in his best-loved poem:

Quote

He drew a circle that shut me out: Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout. But Love and I had the wit to win: We drew a circle that took him in.

From the cover of Spanish sports daily 'Marca' comes a report that could shake both AC Milan and Real Madrid to their foundations...

Real Madrid president-in-waiting Florentino Perez has already sealed an agreement with AC Milan to allow star midfielder Kaka to join up with the Blancos next season, according to Marca. The Madrid-based sports daily claims that Perez, who is set to win the upcoming presidential elections at the Santiago Bernabeu, agreed with Milan vice-president Adriano Galliani to sign the Brazilian during a meeting on March 16. The fee involved will be a colossal €60 million, payable over the next four years - the flagship expenditure of Perez's election campaign, which will begin in earnest in three weeks. Missing from the accord is Kaka himself, whose own economic matters have apparently yet to be settled. However, according to Marca, these will be a mere formality as the Milan agreement was the sticking point.

So confident is the newspaper of this transfer's fruition that the front page currently displays Zinedine Zidane - a well-known Perez ally - handing his old No. 5 shirt to a smiling Kaka. This mock-up photo is to illustrate the fact that the past Ballon d'Or winner is to seek his second World Player of the Year victory wearing the same number that saw the outgoing Fabio Cannavaro lift the award in 2006. Despite the jubilation in Spain, though, it appears as though this transfer saga is far from complete. Adriano Galliani has moved to scotch the rumours, telling La Gazzetta dello Sport this morning, "Florentino Perez and I have set up the G14 and our rapport goes beyond football. That's why I don't want to stir up any controversies and I am very calm. Perez has yet to be re-elected as president at Real and can’t make any commitments." "However, I am sure that if he really wanted to buy Kaka one day, he would come directly to me, without beating around the bush. "Therefore, I am calm: Kaka is not for sale and Florentino will make his peace with it."

Ewan Macdonald & Vince Masiello, Goal.com

I guess they're just rumours - they're so old you just can't believe them. Take a look here, for instance:

From the cover of Spanish sports daily 'Marca' comes a report that could shake both AC Milan and Real Madrid to their foundations...

Real Madrid president-in-waiting Florentino Perez has already sealed an agreement with AC Milan to allow star midfielder Kaka to join up with the Blancos next season, according to Marca. The Madrid-based sports daily claims that Perez, who is set to win the upcoming presidential elections at the Santiago Bernabeu, agreed with Milan vice-president Adriano Galliani to sign the Brazilian during a meeting on March 16. The fee involved will be a colossal €60 million, payable over the next four years - the flagship expenditure of Perez's election campaign, which will begin in earnest in three weeks. Missing from the accord is Kaka himself, whose own economic matters have apparently yet to be settled. However, according to Marca, these will be a mere formality as the Milan agreement was the sticking point.

So confident is the newspaper of this transfer's fruition that the front page currently displays Zinedine Zidane - a well-known Perez ally - handing his old No. 5 shirt to a smiling Kaka. This mock-up photo is to illustrate the fact that the past Ballon d'Or winner is to seek his second World Player of the Year victory wearing the same number that saw the outgoing Fabio Cannavaro lift the award in 2006. Despite the jubilation in Spain, though, it appears as though this transfer saga is far from complete. Adriano Galliani has moved to scotch the rumours, telling La Gazzetta dello Sport this morning, "Florentino Perez and I have set up the G14 and our rapport goes beyond football. That's why I don't want to stir up any controversies and I am very calm. Perez has yet to be re-elected as president at Real and can’t make any commitments." "However, I am sure that if he really wanted to buy Kaka one day, he would come directly to me, without beating around the bush. "Therefore, I am calm: Kaka is not for sale and Florentino will make his peace with it."

Ewan Macdonald & Vince Masiello, Goal.com

I guess they're just rumours - they're so old you just can't believe them. Take a look here, for instance:

Most of the top ranking SS from the very beginning were also homosexual. Ernst Roehm, whom Hitler was a protégé, created the Nazi party on the idea of being proud so called ultra-masculine, male supremacist pedophiles. When you cast a net with that kind of bait what kind of fish do you think you are going to catch? In fact, they actually thought because of their homosexuality they were ultra-masculine because they didn't need women for anything, including sex and companionship. The idea was that because they had no personal need for women, homosexual men were superior to even heterosexual men. They believed that homosexual men were the foundation of all nation-states and represented the elite strata of human society. Naturally, to support their argument they drew much of their pride from the accomplishments of the Greeks, quite possibly the gayest civilization ever to walk to earth.

Heinrich Himmler even complained "Does it not constitute a danger to the Nazi movement if it can be said that Nazi leaders are chosen for sexual reasons?" Apparently Himmler was not complaining so much about all the rampant faggotry around him but just being a homosexual seemed to be the only qualifying factor as to who got promoted in the SS. You might ask, as I did, "Where the @ # ! * did all of these homosexuals come from?" I think that is a fair question. What I found out was that in the 1920s and 30s, homosexuality was known as "the German vice" across Europe because they had so many of them. Here is a fact you can run home and tell your friends -- Germany was actually the birthplace of the gay rights movement. No lie. But back to the Nazi. Ernst Roehm, as the head of 2,500,000 Storm Troops reportedly had units of several hundred thousand Storm Troopers, where almost all the men, without exception, were homosexuals. In fact, the favorite meeting place where some of the earliest formative meetings of the Nazi Party had been held was a "gay" bar in Munich called the Bratwurstglockl where Ernst Roehm kept a table reserved for himself. At the Bratwurstglockl, Roehm and associates - Edmund Heines, Karl Ernst, Ernst's partner Captain Rohrbein, Captain Petersdorf, Count Ernst Helldorf and the rest - would meet to plan and strategize. These were the men who orchestrated the Nazi campaign of intimidation and terror. All of them were homosexuals.

[...]

Just like Gide - and Corydon. They are not positioned as victims, they are proud of their orientation and are rather persuaded of their superiority.

Gide was the proponent of an elitist, aristocratic, intellectual homosexuality. His model was Platonic, his references, Greek. To explain the origins of homosexuality, Corydon plunges into natural history first, as medical works do. Then he attacks the notion that homosexuality is a vice "against nature." Heterosexuality, he suggests, is a matter of "habit" and not of nature, for everything in our society and our education heads us in that direction. If homosexuals persist in their inclinations in spite of all other inducements otherwise, it is because their passion is dictated by nature.

Gide contrasts the "natural" and superior beauty of man to the artificial and "false" allure of woman. He draws parallels between beauty and art, and associates the exaltation of male beauty with historical periods of glory and ostentation, and celebration of "Venusian" qualities with the centuries of decline and decay.

The male having far more resources than can be directed to the reproductive function, he seeks alternative outlets for his desire. In a monogamist society, prostitution or adultery are the only other options. Corydon proposes a historical, healthy and noble solution, that of the ancient Greece, evoking the last brilliance of Sparta and the Sacred Band of the Thebes. Lacedaemon is not just a random example: the city embodied the warlike spirit, courage and virile force, the characteristics most diametrically opposed to those popularly ascribed to homosexuals.

The ultimate desire of mankind is to identify wholeness, to grasp the essence of being, to be integrated with the harmony, perfection, patterns, and cycles of the material, metaphorical and metaphysical worlds. This desire motivates us to explore the realms of fact and fancy, logic and metaphor, reason and emotion, to capture the whole of being in one part, to see it, hear it, feel it, and enjoy it in everyday life. The circle is an object of nature, an idealization of pure mathematics, and a symbol or framework we use to understand and describe our world. The circle exists independently of human thought, as ripples in a pond, or the appearance of the sun and moon, or the shape of the iris of an eye. In mathematics, we choose to define a circle as the places at a constant distance from a center, usually in two dimensions.

The Yin-Yang symbol of two parts spiraling within a circle is a traditional icon of Confucianism and Taoism. It suggests movement around the inside of the circle. It also provides a paradigm of polarity with which to view the dynamics of everyday life. As a symbol, it can be as personal and internal as a heart, which gives and receives blood through each complete cycle. It can also be as general and external as the cycles of day and night.

The Buddhist circular mandala designs have been used continuously for millennia. "A mandala (Sanskrit for "circle") is a symbolic diagram of the universe, arranged in circles, used in tantric Buddhism. The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung considered the mandala to be a universally occurring pattern associated with the mythological representation of the self.

Zoroastrianism, the tradition of ancient Persia, is believed by scholars to have been influential in the later development of metaphysical concepts in Abrahamic and Eastern religious beliefs. Its influence survives to our own day, not only in central Asia, but in such products of the European post-Romantic movement as Richard Strauss's music and Friedrich Nietzsche's book, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." Modern historians have dated the time of Zoroaster to approximately 1750 BC. Also known as Zarathustra, he was the founder of the Zoroastrian tradition. One symbol of Zoroastrianism is the Fra-vahar, a figure that stands for the ideal moral and spiritual focus in life. Fra is the direction, forward, and vahar describes a pulling force. Of the two circles in the figure, the ring in the hand is a reminder that we are bound to keep our promises or agreements with others. The other circle, at the waist, reminds us that our spirits live on, in essence immortal, and so also symbolizes infinity.

The mystical theologian Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa regarded mathematics as the best symbol for things divine. He says in De Docta Ignorantia:

Quote

Since there is no other approach to a knowledge of things divine than that of symbols, we cannot do better than use mathematical signs on account of their indestructible certitude

For example, Cusa used geometry to illustrate the identity of the circle and the line. As a circle becomes very large, it appears less curved, much like how the surface of the Earth appears flat to us because it is so large. In the limit where the circle becomes infinite, then the curvature vanishes and the circle coincides with the straight line.

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/16336/fig4.gif)

Cusa's correspondence between the circle and the line, however, has two disadvantages. First, it does not include the point at infinity. Second, it requires passing through an infinite process to form the correspondence. Our approach will therefore differ from Cusa's, even though it follows his basic insight that the apparent opposites of the line circle can be identified. As we will see below, there is another mathematical correspondence between the circle and the line which includes the point at infinity and requires no infinite process. The correspondence is essentially a transformation of our point of view so that the line is seen as a circle. This shift in perspective reveals that the line discontinuously separated from the point at infinity is equivalent to a single continuous circle.

We begin by drawing a vertical z-axis through the line to form a Cartesian coordinate system with the origin of the x-axis at (0,0) and the point at infinity at (0,−1). Now draw a circle of radius 1 with its center at the origin. Note that the point at infinity corresponds to the bottom point on the circle. In addition, the points (−1,0) and (1,0) on the line correspond to points on the circle. There is thus a self-evident correspondence between three points on the circle and three points of the linear mandala. Moreover, there is a one-to-one correspondence between all the other points on the line and all the other points on the circle.

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/16337/circle.gif)

To see this correspondence, imagine a line rotating around the pivot point (0,-1) or, if you prefer, an infinite number of lines radiating outward from (0,-1), the point at infinity. Each of these lines intersects the x-axis at a single point and also intersects the circle at a single point. In other words, each line creates a one-to-one correspondence between a point on the line and a point on the circle. This means that the circle is equivalent to the line.

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/16338/bijection.gif)

Notice that there is one line that does not actually intersect the x-axis: the horizontal line parallel to the x-axis. This line does, however, intersect the point p at infinity, which is also a unique point on the circle. This line, therefore, matches these two points. Thus, the line plus the point at infinity is equivalent to the entire circle: every point on this circular mandala is matched with one unique point in the linear mandala. Moreover, this correspondence is continuous, meaning that it matches nearby points on the line with nearby points on the circle. In technical terms, this continuous equivalence of the line to the circle is expressed more precisely by saying that the extended real line is homeomorphic to the circle, i.e., they are topologically isomorphic. The essential fact to understand is that the line plus the point at infinity is completely equivalent to the circle, so we are perfectly justified in viewing it as really being a circle.

Jung has been called weird by many because of his interest in the occult. Freud, for instance, would write to Jung in response to his letter:

Jung: "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you... I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment."

Freud: "In matters of occultism I have grown humble since the great lesson Ferenczi's experiences gave me. I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall do so gladly, that you know. But my hubris has been shattered."

Yet, early on Freud himself dabbled in the Kabbala, the esoteric branch of Jewish mysticism. He belonged to a Jewish society called B'nai B'rith and enjoyed weekly games of taroc, a complicated and popular card game which some people think is based on Kabbala. The taroc deck varies in size, but it includes 22 trump cards from the tarot, which are rich in symbolic imagery. The symbolism on these cards may well have set Freud on the path towards his first ideas about the unconscious: it was at this time that he presented his first ideas about dream interpretation. This information has been largely suppresed, probably because it wasn't approved of in Freud's contemporary society, with its rising tide of fierce anti-semitism. Later Freud strongly disapproved in public of what he called 'the occult.'

By the way, in academic circles Freud was often seen as opinionated and rather peculiar so that much of his work was done in what he called 'splendid isolation,' just as it had been from boyhood. He obviously had outstanding intellect, but by his own admission, he had a rather neurotic, obsessive personality and could not imagine a life without work He wrote incessantly and much of his writing was done on his days off, or even after a busy day seeing his patients. Freud's obsessive personality meant that he was the kind of person who has to do everything meticulously and accurately and he liked to be in control. This can be seen in various ways outside of his work. He was very superstitious about certain numbers -- for instance, he became utterly convinced that he would die at 61 or 62, because of a series of rather tenous coincidencies to do with odd things like hotel room numbers. This kind of thinking is the down side of the type of self-controlled personality that is obsessional enough to produce the astonishing volume of work that Freud did. In extreme cases it can lead to what is known as an obsessional neurosis, where the sufferer is driven by endless compulsive rituals, and becomes unable to function normally.

Freud was a great collector of antiques, fired by his earlier classical studies and his interest in ancient history. He accumulated vast numbers of antique statuettes and other artefacts that are still in display in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, which is now part of a Freud museum. They are crammed in all over the place, showing that he was not particularly interested in their artistic value, but more in the feeling of connection with the past that they gave him and the sheer pleasure of collecting them. His compulsive streak shows up again in the fact that he smoked cigars heavily nearly all his life and found it impossible to stop, even when he was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923 and realized that tabacco was doing him no good. It was not until he had a heart attack in 1930 that he finally gave up.

Interesting three lotteries, they say Freud and Jung never saw eye to eye about many issues

I couldn't agree more, louiebstef! I am sick and tired of this "worm" that's been around for years by now - and I want to say this to him: take a piece of paper and write down what is it that you really think, what you really want to do (in spite of the fact that you are not in actuality capable of doing much of it). Apply to it all your ethics, every kind of ethics you can apply to it, and then come back here to tell us whether you still have something valuable and interesting to share. Or else shut the hell up!

With all this cutting and pasting you cannot but demonstrate one thing: that you hiding from yourself, refusing to see yourself in the eye for fear of either too much or too little being there!

As for us, you are history - but of the kind that's too vulgar to repeat itself! You came, you lost, you disappeared! We feared you, fought you and survived you! You are now more than welcome to transcend your ever-changing values when trying to parasitize another human realm, hoping, of course, that your infecting powers are up to par to your mission!

Good Luck and always remember us as your unwilling buddies in a journey that lasted all too long!

(http://img444.imageshack.us/img444/1658/rembrandtharmenszvanrijxw9.jpg)Moses and the Tablets, Rembrandt

By all accounts, the revelation at Sinai was one of the great moments in religious history, sufficiently powerful to have transformed a complaining and bedraggled mixture of slaves and rabble into a God-enthused nation dedicated to the ideal of perfecting the world in the kingship of the Divine. The one tangible result of that one-time-epiphany came in the form of two tablets recording the Ten Commandments. After 40 days and 40 nights on the mountain with God, Moses descended from Sinai, carrying "tablets inscribed on both their surfaces ... The tablets were God's work, and the writing was God's writing." However, the Israelites sank to the depravity of worshipping a golden calf when Moses, their leader, did not return when expected. Moses became enraged by the Israelites' idolatry, and he smashed the tablets, written by the finger of God, to smithereens. At the same time, the great prophet-leader of his people beseeched God to forgive the errant tribes, and caused the Almighty to present a second set of tablets replacing the first.

Now Freud contended that while rising and letting the tablets slip, Michelangelo's Moses gained control of his rage; thus, the right hand was retracted in the beard, pulling it along in the wake of his gesture, and clamping down on the slipping tablets along with the tension of his inner right arm. Freud believed that Michelangelo's Moses was and always will be a figure in the act of restraining himself from rising in the anger of his own passion.

Sincerely, I just don't get why Freud is making such a big deal about it - did not God provide a second set after Moses smashed the original tablets?

It is in his/her interest, after all, for people to have a copy of them!

In an interview with Cedar Rapids, Iowa, radio station WMT-AM today, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said executives of AIG should consider following what he described of the Japanese model of shamed corporate executives: apology or suicide. "I don't know whether the ($165 million in bonuses) is an issue as much as just the chutzpah of the people running AIG," Grassley said. "That they could thumb their nose at the taxpayers, it's more that. The attitude of these corporate executives and bank executives, and most of them are in New York, that somehow they're not responsible for their company going into the tank," he said."I suggest, you know, obviously maybe they ought to be removed, but I would suggest that the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them [is] if they would follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I'm sorry and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide." Grassley added, "In the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology."

In a Tuesday morning conference call, Grassley told reporters, according to the AP, that "what I'm expressing here obviously is not that I want people to commit suicide. That's not my notion. But I do feel very strongly that we have not had statements of apology, statements of remorse, statements of contrition on the part of CEOs of manufacturing companies or banks or financial services or insurance companies that are asking for bailouts." Last October, Grassley invoked the Japanese model a little less harshly. "I've suggested it wouldn't be a bad thing that the leadership of these institutions would take a Japanese-style approach to corporate governance," he said then. "And I'm not talking about going out and committing suicide as some Japanese do in these circumstances, but I am talking about scenes I've seen on television where in belly-up corporations the CEOs go before the board of directors, before the public, before the stockholders and bow deeply and apologize for their mismanagement. Something like that happening among Wall Street executives would go a long way toward satisfying my constituents and many Americans that help might be needed and would more gracefully be given by the taxpayers of this county." And responding to the news that Wall Street bankers gave themselves $18.4 billion worth of bonuses in 2008, Grassley told the New York Times' Maureen Dowd at the end of January that the executives "ought to give 'em back or we should go get 'em. If this were Japan and a corporate executive did what is being done on Wall Street, they'd either go out and commit suicide or go before the board of directors and the country and take a very deep bow and apologize."

- jpt

These people might have committed suicide had they lost all their money personally, but - unfortunately - for no other reason. I mean, that's the American way, isn't it?!

The mystical theologian Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa regarded mathematics as the best symbol for things divine. He says in De Docta Ignorantia:

Quote

Since there is no other approach to a knowledge of things divine than that of symbols, we cannot do better than use mathematical signs on account of their indestructible certitude

For example, Cusa used geometry to illustrate the identity of the circle and the line. As a circle becomes very large, it appears less curved, much like how the surface of the Earth appears flat to us because it is so large. In the limit where the circle becomes infinite, then the curvature vanishes and the circle coincides with the straight line.

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/16336/fig4.gif)

Cusa's correspondence between the circle and the line, however, has two disadvantages. First, it does not include the point at infinity. Second, it requires passing through an infinite process to form the correspondence. Our approach will therefore differ from Cusa's, even though it follows his basic insight that the apparent opposites of the line circle can be identified. As we will see below, there is another mathematical correspondence between the circle and the line which includes the point at infinity and requires no infinite process. The correspondence is essentially a transformation of our point of view so that the line is seen as a circle. This shift in perspective reveals that the line discontinuously separated from the point at infinity is equivalent to a single continuous circle.

We begin by drawing a vertical z-axis through the line to form a Cartesian coordinate system with the origin of the x-axis at (0,0) and the point at infinity at (0,−1). Now draw a circle of radius 1 with its center at the origin. Note that the point at infinity corresponds to the bottom point on the circle. In addition, the points (−1,0) and (1,0) on the line correspond to points on the circle. There is thus a self-evident correspondence between three points on the circle and three points of the linear mandala. Moreover, there is a one-to-one correspondence between all the other points on the line and all the other points on the circle.

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/16337/circle.gif)

To see this correspondence, imagine a line rotating around the pivot point (0,-1) or, if you prefer, an infinite number of lines radiating outward from (0,-1), the point at infinity. Each of these lines intersects the x-axis at a single point and also intersects the circle at a single point. In other words, each line creates a one-to-one correspondence between a point on the line and a point on the circle. This means that the circle is equivalent to the line.

(http://www.avatarhosting.net/pics/16338/bijection.gif)

Notice that there is one line that does not actually intersect the x-axis: the horizontal line parallel to the x-axis. This line does, however, intersect the point p at infinity, which is also a unique point on the circle. This line, therefore, matches these two points. Thus, the line plus the point at infinity is equivalent to the entire circle: every point on this circular mandala is matched with one unique point in the linear mandala. Moreover, this correspondence is continuous, meaning that it matches nearby points on the line with nearby points on the circle. In technical terms, this continuous equivalence of the line to the circle is expressed more precisely by saying that the extended real line is homeomorphic to the circle, i.e., they are topologically isomorphic. The essential fact to understand is that the line plus the point at infinity is completely equivalent to the circle, so we are perfectly justified in viewing it as really being a circle.

WTF man, do you actually have the time to post all this * & ^ %?! Can't believe it!

Copyright issues have traditionally been not given the importance they deserve. That's have been the case even in the US, let alone in less developed countries. When I was in school in Russia I remember many professors who'd translate books from English to Russian and publish it as if they had written it themselves, under their own name. We as students would not mind it had the books been translated correctly.. but these "professors" did not even know English good enough!

Believe it or not, in British law publishing someone else's original copy work and claiming you have made it (known as plagiarism and completely different from copyright infringement) is a criminal offence. For the most part, the criminal law is only used for commercial copyright infringement with one exception, and an offence is committed when knowing or reasonably suspecting that the files are illegal copies, and without the permission of the copyright owner, a person:

makes unauthorised copies e.g. burning music files or films on to CD-Rs or DVD-Rs;

distributes, sells or hires out unauthorised copies of CDs, VCDs and DVDs;

on a larger scale, distributes unauthorised copies as a commercial enterprise on the internet;

possesses unauthorised copies with a view to distributing, selling or hiring these to other people;

while not dealing commercially, distributes unauthorised copies of software packages, books, music, games, and films on such a scale as to have a measurable impact on the copyright owner's business;

publishing someone else's original copy work and claiming you have made it

certain copyrights allow Archival copies of software to be made however these are not to be distributed.

The penalties for these "copyright infringement" offences depend on the seriousness of the offences:

before a magistrates' Court, the penalties for distributing unauthorised files are a maximum fine of £5,000 and/or six months imprisonment;

in the Crown Court, the penalties for distributing unauthorised files are an unlimited fine and/or up to 10 years imprisonment.

Also note §24 Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 which creates a range of offences relating to the distribution of any device, product or component which is primarily designed, produced, or adapted for the purpose of enabling or facilitating the circumvention of effective technological measures. When this is for non-commercial purposes, it requires there to be a measurable effect on the rights holder's business.

Plagiarism is indeed a thorny issue! I mean, to engage in the actual creative process to write a book requires a lot of mental energy and concentration. I have even read strange stuff, as to what might motivate a writer and incite his creative process.

Friedrich Schiller, the great 18th-century German writer, for instance, had to smell rotten apples for his inspiration to be stimulated. Schiller simply could not work without the smell of rotten apples. Professionals tried to offer an explanation for the phenomena - the fermented rotten apples probably sent a little alcohol to his nose, which could have played a role in inspiring and stimulating him to begin writing.

As early as August 1912, Jung had intimated a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-tones archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth psychology. This takes us to the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia. Pistis Sophia is an important Gnostic text. The five remaining copies, which scholars date c. 250­-300 AD, relate the Gnostic teachings of the transfigured Jesus to the assembled disciples (including his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Martha), when the risen Christ had accomplished 11 years speaking with his disciples. In it the complex structures and hierarchies of heaven familiar in Gnostic teachings are revealed. The female divinity of gnosticism is Sophia, a being with many aspects and names. She is sometimes identified with the Holy Ghost itself but, according to her various capacities, is also the Universal Mother, the Mother of the Living or Resplendent Mother, the Power on High, She-of-the-left-hand (as opposed to Christ, understood as her husband and he of the Right Hand), as the Luxurious One, the Womb, the Virgin, the Wife of the Male, the Revealer of Perfect Mysteries, the Saint Columba of the Spirit, the Heavenly Mother, the Wandering One, or Elena (that is, Selene, the Moon). She was envisaged as the Psyche of the world and the female aspect of Logos.

Jung has been called weird by many because of his interest in the occult. Freud, for instance, would write to Jung in response to his letter:

Jung: "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you... I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment."

Freud: "In matters of occultism I have grown humble since the great lesson Ferenczi's experiences gave me. I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall do so gladly, that you know. But my hubris has been shattered."

Yet, early on Freud himself dabbled in the Kabbala, the esoteric branch of Jewish mysticism. He belonged to a Jewish society called B'nai B'rith and enjoyed weekly games of taroc, a complicated and popular card game which some people think is based on Kabbala. The taroc deck varies in size, but it includes 22 trump cards from the tarot, which are rich in symbolic imagery. The symbolism on these cards may well have set Freud on the path towards his first ideas about the unconscious: it was at this time that he presented his first ideas about dream interpretation. This information has been largely suppresed, probably because it wasn't approved of in Freud's contemporary society, with its rising tide of fierce anti-semitism. Later Freud strongly disapproved in public of what he called 'the occult.'

By the way, in academic circles Freud was often seen as opinionated and rather peculiar so that much of his work was done in what he called 'splendid isolation,' just as it had been from boyhood. He obviously had outstanding intellect, but by his own admission, he had a rather neurotic, obsessive personality and could not imagine a life without work He wrote incessantly and much of his writing was done on his days off, or even after a busy day seeing his patients. Freud's obsessive personality meant that he was the kind of person who has to do everything meticulously and accurately and he liked to be in control. This can be seen in various ways outside of his work. He was very superstitious about certain numbers -- for instance, he became utterly convinced that he would die at 61 or 62, because of a series of rather tenous coincidencies to do with odd things like hotel room numbers. This kind of thinking is the down side of the type of self-controlled personality that is obsessional enough to produce the astonishing volume of work that Freud did. In extreme cases it can lead to what is known as an obsessional neurosis, where the sufferer is driven by endless compulsive rituals, and becomes unable to function normally.

Freud was a great collector of antiques, fired by his earlier classical studies and his interest in ancient history. He accumulated vast numbers of antique statuettes and other artefacts that are still in display in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, which is now part of a Freud museum. They are crammed in all over the place, showing that he was not particularly interested in their artistic value, but more in the feeling of connection with the past that they gave him and the sheer pleasure of collecting them. His compulsive streak shows up again in the fact that he smoked cigars heavily nearly all his life and found it impossible to stop, even when he was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923 and realized that tabacco was doing him no good. It was not until he had a heart attack in 1930 that he finally gave up.

Interesting, three_lotteries, did you find this information online or it's from some book?

Both Freud and Jung were rumored to be total weirdos ... too bad they infected the whole world with their crap!

[…] most famously of all, waiters who rush about. All of these, he says, are slaves to other people's perceptions - 'the Other'. They are exhibiting mauvaise foi -- 'bad faith'. […] It is here that the waiter comes in:

Quote

His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the hand and arm ("Being and Nothingness") [1943]

Stop by Café de Flore to indulge in Camus' 'local' after he had a falling out with Sartre and Beauvoir. Popular also among the surrealists, existentialists and la bande à Prevert, apparently Johnny Depp hangs out here too.

Indeed, Ex, in a scene reminiscent of Rosie O'Donnell's days on "The View," hosts Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Whoopi Goldberg got into a heated exchange over the use of the "N" word on Thursday morning. [...]

Elizabeth is a bit weird.. take a look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYiHwubLcd8

Mrs. Hasselbeck is being paranoid I think.. I mean who'd @ # ! * i n g care that much as to create a fictitious character bearing her name to poke fun of her?! Who the @ # ! * does she think she is?!

Stupid, really - I mean, true, it's kind of creepy that the character of LnO who's raped and murdered appeared to bear a name similar to hers - but, still, you do not go on air and announce and complain about it!

As early as August 1912, Jung had intimated a letter to Freud that he had an intuition that the essentially feminine-tones archaic wisdom of the Gnostics, symbolically called Sophia, was destined to re-enter modern Western culture by way of depth psychology. This takes us to the Gnostic text the Pistis Sophia. Pistis Sophia is an important Gnostic text. The five remaining copies, which scholars date c. 250­-300 AD, relate the Gnostic teachings of the transfigured Jesus to the assembled disciples (including his mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, and Martha), when the risen Christ had accomplished 11 years speaking with his disciples. In it the complex structures and hierarchies of heaven familiar in Gnostic teachings are revealed. The female divinity of gnosticism is Sophia, a being with many aspects and names. She is sometimes identified with the Holy Ghost itself but, according to her various capacities, is also the Universal Mother, the Mother of the Living or Resplendent Mother, the Power on High, She-of-the-left-hand (as opposed to Christ, understood as her husband and he of the Right Hand), as the Luxurious One, the Womb, the Virgin, the Wife of the Male, the Revealer of Perfect Mysteries, the Saint Columba of the Spirit, the Heavenly Mother, the Wandering One, or Elena (that is, Selene, the Moon). She was envisaged as the Psyche of the world and the female aspect of Logos.

Jung has been called weird by many because of his interest in the occult. Freud, for instance, would write to Jung in response to his letter:

Jung: "My evenings are taken up very largely with astrology. I make horoscopic calculations in order to find a clue to the core of psychological truth. Some remarkable things have turned up which will certainly appear incredible to you... I dare say that we shall one day discover in astrology a good deal of knowledge that has been intuitively projected into the heavens. For instance, it appears that the signs of the zodiac are character pictures, in other words libido symbols which depict the typical qualities of the libido at a given moment."

Freud: "In matters of occultism I have grown humble since the great lesson Ferenczi's experiences gave me. I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable. I shall do so gladly, that you know. But my hubris has been shattered."

Yet, early on Freud himself dabbled in the Kabbala, the esoteric branch of Jewish mysticism. He belonged to a Jewish society called B'nai B'rith and enjoyed weekly games of taroc, a complicated and popular card game which some people think is based on Kabbala. The taroc deck varies in size, but it includes 22 trump cards from the tarot, which are rich in symbolic imagery. The symbolism on these cards may well have set Freud on the path towards his first ideas about the unconscious: it was at this time that he presented his first ideas about dream interpretation. This information has been largely suppresed, probably because it wasn't approved of in Freud's contemporary society, with its rising tide of fierce anti-semitism. Later Freud strongly disapproved in public of what he called 'the occult.'

By the way, in academic circles Freud was often seen as opinionated and rather peculiar so that much of his work was done in what he called 'splendid isolation,' just as it had been from boyhood. He obviously had outstanding intellect, but by his own admission, he had a rather neurotic, obsessive personality and could not imagine a life without work He wrote incessantly and much of his writing was done on his days off, or even after a busy day seeing his patients. Freud's obsessive personality meant that he was the kind of person who has to do everything meticulously and accurately and he liked to be in control. This can be seen in various ways outside of his work. He was very superstitious about certain numbers -- for instance, he became utterly convinced that he would die at 61 or 62, because of a series of rather tenous coincidencies to do with odd things like hotel room numbers. This kind of thinking is the down side of the type of self-controlled personality that is obsessional enough to produce the astonishing volume of work that Freud did. In extreme cases it can lead to what is known as an obsessional neurosis, where the sufferer is driven by endless compulsive rituals, and becomes unable to function normally.

Freud was a great collector of antiques, fired by his earlier classical studies and his interest in ancient history. He accumulated vast numbers of antique statuettes and other artefacts that are still in display in his study at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, which is now part of a Freud museum. They are crammed in all over the place, showing that he was not particularly interested in their artistic value, but more in the feeling of connection with the past that they gave him and the sheer pleasure of collecting them. His compulsive streak shows up again in the fact that he smoked cigars heavily nearly all his life and found it impossible to stop, even when he was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1923 and realized that tabacco was doing him no good. It was not until he had a heart attack in 1930 that he finally gave up.

3 lotteries, Jung was totally nuts - and yet, I've read some stories about Freud that make me think he too might have been 50/50 when it comes to this thing.

After a verbose preamble, which among other things informs you helpfully that "behavior becomes unacceptable when it infringes on the rights of others," the Code of Conduct of the Public Library of the city where I live provides thirty-one examples of unacceptable conduct. These examples can be sorted into five general categories:

[...] How well does this theory apply to a typical piece of modern bureaucratic regulation? Or the types of behavior the library code prohibits, you might note that only those listed in the first category can be thought to convey useful information to any minimally socialized member of the community. There could be a real reason as to whether you're allowed to bring a bag of pretzels into the library, but do you really require "notice" that you can't snatch purses, expose yourself to patrons, do your laundry in the bathroom, or play high-stakes poker in the reference area? Suppose you hadn't been given notice of any of these things; does it follow you're free to claim as a defense insufficient publicity on the part of the state?

Can there be any non-psychotic person of minimally functional intelligence who would suppose that any of the things on this list, other than those dealt with in the most site-specific regulations, were not prohibited? [...] So here we seem to be faced with a wholly superfluous invocation of legal rules: rules that merely reflect tacit social understandings that themselves have no apparent need to be cast into a public legal text.

[...]

Posting a public notice of the unacceptability of theft, or of exhibitionism, or of physical and sexual abuse, is very much like passing yet another law providing still more penalties for the sale of already illegal drugs. Such actions represent our legal culture's equivalent to the practice of nailing garlic over doorways to repel vampires. In each case a psychological imperative born of a sense of lack of control, and of the fear and anxiety this sensation produces, demands of us that we "do something." Those same factors then lead us to do things that appear in the cold light of rational analysis to be almost wholly irrational.

Funny I read the other day a joke - it kinda illustrates what's talked about here:

Little Johnny is riding a bike to the street corner and he sees a cop riding a horse. The cop asks "Did Santa give you that bike?" and Johnny replies "Yes!" so the cop hands him over a ticket and says, "Here, next year, tell Santa to put lights on it!"

Johnny gets annoyed and asks "Did Santa give you that horse?" The cop plays along by telling him "Yes!" and Johnny tells him "Next year, tell him the d i c k goes under the horse, not on top of it!" and rides off on his bike.

Looks like the mods have a lil' bit of sense of humor left when leaving this thread open! Because all I can see here is threads being closed down!

I do not know in what sense you're saying this, but I take it as too much fuss on the part of legal scholars to formulate "theories" and the like, when in actuality things are settled in practice much easier. There is actually a book called "Wisdom of Crowds," exploring the apparent anomaly that crowds of non-experts seem to be collectively smarter than individual experts or even small groups of experts.

This basic insight is at the heart of contemporary financial investment theory, with its emphasis on the difficulty of outguessing the market. Beginning with British scientist Francis Galton's remarkable discovery in 1906 that a crowd of non-experts proved surprisingly competent at guessing the weight of an ox, financial columnist and author James Surowiecki skillfully recounts experiments, discoveries and anecdotes that demonstrate productive group thinking. The concept does not come as news to anyone reasonably well read in modern financial literature.

corec, I'm not sure that's the case - I am afraid we'd be putting the d i c k up the horse that way, just like the story of the little boy and the cop's Santa above.

After a verbose preamble, which among other things informs you helpfully that "behavior becomes unacceptable when it infringes on the rights of others," the Code of Conduct of the Public Library of the city where I live provides thirty-one examples of unacceptable conduct. These examples can be sorted into five general categories:

[...] How well does this theory apply to a typical piece of modern bureaucratic regulation? Or the types of behavior the library code prohibits, you might note that only those listed in the first category can be thought to convey useful information to any minimally socialized member of the community. There could be a real reason as to whether you're allowed to bring a bag of pretzels into the library, but do you really require "notice" that you can't snatch purses, expose yourself to patrons, do your laundry in the bathroom, or play high-stakes poker in the reference area? Suppose you hadn't been given notice of any of these things; does it follow you're free to claim as a defense insufficient publicity on the part of the state?

Can there be any non-psychotic person of minimally functional intelligence who would suppose that any of the things on this list, other than those dealt with in the most site-specific regulations, were not prohibited? [...] So here we seem to be faced with a wholly superfluous invocation of legal rules: rules that merely reflect tacit social understandings that themselves have no apparent need to be cast into a public legal text.

[...]

Posting a public notice of the unacceptability of theft, or of exhibitionism, or of physical and sexual abuse, is very much like passing yet another law providing still more penalties for the sale of already illegal drugs. Such actions represent our legal culture's equivalent to the practice of nailing garlic over doorways to repel vampires. In each case a psychological imperative born of a sense of lack of control, and of the fear and anxiety this sensation produces, demands of us that we "do something." Those same factors then lead us to do things that appear in the cold light of rational analysis to be almost wholly irrational.

Funny I read the other day a joke - it kinda illustrates what's talked about here:

Little Johnny is riding a bike to the street corner and he sees a cop riding a horse. The cop asks "Did Santa give you that bike?" and Johnny replies "Yes!" so the cop hands him over a ticket and says, "Here, next year, tell Santa to put lights on it!"

Johnny gets annoyed and asks "Did Santa give you that horse?" The cop plays along by telling him "Yes!" and Johnny tells him "Next year, tell him the d i c k goes under the horse, not on top of it!" and rides off on his bike.

Hahaha eli - you're so funny - I have read a slightly different version of the joke though - anyway!

The trouble with medicine in the modern Western world is that there is so little doctors can do. Miracle cures are as rare today as in biblical times. Most conditions presented to GPs in their surgeries are long-term, chronic complaints for which modern medicine offers no cure and not much in the way of treatment. Talk to any GP and you will hear a tale of frustration at the prospect of another packed surgery with patients who cannot be helped except with liberal doses of TLC (tender-loving-care), backed perhaps by a harmless prescription to make them feel their complaint is a genuine problem. It is difficult for doctors. They enter the profession with high expectations of healing the sick and curing disease, and they discover that reality is crueller. The major causes of ill health - diseases such as diphtheria, typhoid and polio - have long since been defeated by improved living conditions, vaccination and antibiotics. For modern ailments - failing hearts, stiffened joints, old age - there is little to offer.

[...] Dr. Mathew Lukwiya was at the opposite end of the spectrum. He was one of the top graduates of his generation at the University of Makerere in Kampala, but instead of emigrating to South Africa, like many of his colleagues, where a life of relative ease and wealth would have awaited him, he chose to put his talents to work where they mattered, in the war-torn province of northern Uganda where he was born. Why does a doctor make such a choice? There are many reasons, of course -- but one may be the prospect of making a real difference. To serve a population facing extreme privation and poverty after years of war is to know real power. The simplest remedies -- cheap antibiotics, basic surgery -- can have the most dramatic effects. A doctor there can save lives on a major scale.

Making a difference is what most doctors want to do but, in the West, find difficult to achieve. [...] Curing them is more difficult. Caring, not curing, is what medicine is mostly about. But for some doctors, discovering their powerlessness can be a source of unhappiness.

[...]

Doctors are taught that while death is the enemy, it is also natural and inevitable, and not necessarily evil per se. Death quite literally can't be stopped, so the goal instead is to minimize suffering and the amount of "needless" or "premature" death. For the overwhelming majority of nurses and physicians, death remains a nasty adversary. [...]

[...] You get accustomed to seeing some very bad stuff. Consider their ethics. They're quite real, but they are also very situational. They quite properly don't employ the same extreme measures to prolong the life of a terminal 95-year-old as they do when faced with a gravely ill child. When resources are limited, they try to get the most bang for the buck by focusing first on those who can be saved. This is the philosophical basis for triage, the standard emergency room and battlefield crisis practice of separating patients [...]

http://www.lawschooldiscussion.org/index.php?topic=3004539.msg5148087

Mother here - my daughter just finished her IR (Internal Medicine) residency and was recently appointed at a nearby hospital. She comes home every day stressed-out, disappointed, appearing to be quite disillusioned with her career path. She mostly takes care of terminally-ill patients and says she receives no satisfaction from her work, in the meaning that her work made a difference - with a feeling a powerlessness and futility, that no matter what she does, her patients will soon die. She studied for 12 years medicine after graduating from high-school (that makes it 22 years of schooling, I guess) and feels now she just does not see the point of all that hard work, doing the kind of work she's doing.

Now I understand that many young/younger people may have this kind of attitude - but look at how beautifully the post I quoted puts it: medicine is more about caring, rather than curing. I am not saying that she does not understand that minimizing the suffering and the amount of "needless" or "premature" death does not really matter, it's just that she probably doesn't fully believes it, or not reflected enough on that.

Doing something, rather than paralyzed by the anxiety that very few times we can claim to be the "heroes" is what really matters, isn't it?!

"I want the moon," Camus' antihero Caligula reminds us incessantly. Well, emperors will be emperors, but your typical man on the street, upon unearthing such a desire from the depths of his own soul, might conclude that the goal is impractical and move on to something else!

"Gaying" him just because he's stretching Ronaldo? I mean, that's part of the training thing they're supposed to do.. employing this kind of "logic" the guy sitting next to you whose leg accidently touches yours has to be gay!

Gimme a break, fellas!

Frank's - but, of course, we understand that - just because they're touching their legs that way, they're not gay.

Title: Re: Sacrifices
Post by: qmo on April 05, 2012, 03:30:05 PM

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Theuth is the father's other, the father, and himself. He cannot be assigned a fixed location in the play. Sly, slippery and masked, an intriguer and a card, he is neither king nor jack, but rather a sort of a joker, a floating signifier, a wild card, one who puts play into play. And this joker is the inventor of play, of games of draughts, dice, etc. Every act of his is marked by an unstable ambivalence. He is the god of calculation, arithmetic and rational science; and he also presides over the occult sciences, astrology and alchemy. He is the god of magic formulae, of secret accounts, of hidden texts. And so he is the god of medicine. The god of writing is the god of pharmakon... So can Theuth simply have meant writing as a "remedy"? Isn't the undecidable demi-god condemned to invent undecidables? Not just remedies, but pharmakons? Isn't Theuth's desire for writing a desire for orphanhood and patricidal subversion? Isn't this pharmakon a criminal thing, a poisoned gift?

Well, if the virus is neither living nor not-living, then it's puzzingly undecidable. As we'll see, undecidability is a threat to the traditional foundations of philosophy. Undecidables are threatening. They poison the comforting sense that we inhabit a world governed by decidable categories. Binary opposotions classify and organize the objects, events and relations of the world. They make decision possible. And they govern thinking in everyday life, as well as philosophy, theory and the sciences. Undecidables disrupt this oppositional logic. They slip across both sides of an opposition but don't properly fit either. They are more than the opposition can allow. And because of that, they question the very principle of "opposition."

Truth-be-told, this seems kinda odd to me, but I felt it relates (to the above posts) - reason why I am adding it

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Although the word-chain pharmakeia-pharmakon-pharmakeus appears several times in Plato's texts, he never uses a closely related term, pharmakos, which means 'scapegoat'. According to Derrida, that it is not used by Plato does not indicate that the word is necessarily absent, or rather, it is always-already present as a 'trace'.

In ancient Athens, the ritual of the pharmakos was used to expel and shut out the evil (out of the body and out of the city). To achieve this, the Athenians maintained several outcasts at public expense. In the event of any calamity, they sacrificed one or more than one outcast as a purification and a remedy. The pharmakos, the 'scapegoat', the 'outsider' was led to the outside of the city walls and killed in order to purify the city's interior. The evil that had infected the city from 'outside' is removed and returned to the 'outside', forever. But, ironically, the representative of the outside (the pharmakos) was nonetheless kept at the very heart of the inside, the city, and that too in public expense. In order to be led out of the city, the scapegoat must have already been within the city. The ceremony of the pharmakos is played out on the boundary line between the 'inside' and the 'outside', which it has as its function ceaselessly to trace and retrace.

Similarly, the pharmakos stands on the thin red line between sacred and cursed, ... beneficial insofar as he cures - and for that, venerated and cared for - harmful insofar as he incarnates the powers of evil - and for that, feared and treated with caution. He is the healer who cures, and he is the criminal who is the incarnation of the powers of evil. The pharmakos is like a medicine, pharmakon, in case of a specific disease, but, like most medicines, he is, simultaneously, a poison, evil all the same. Pharmakos, Pharmakon: they escape both the sides by at once being and not being on a side. Both words carry within themselves more than one meaning, that is, conflicting meanings.

Pharmakos does not only mean scapegoat. It is a synonym for pharmakeus, a word often repeated by Plato, meaning 'wizard', 'magician', even 'poisoner'. In Plato's dialogues, Socrates is often depicted and termed as a pharmakeus. Socrates is considered as one who knows how to perform magic with words, and notably, not with written letters. His words act as a pharmakon (as a remedy, or allegedly as a poison as far as the Athenian authority were concerned) and change, cure the soul of the listener). In Phaedrus, he fiercely objects to the evil effects of writing, which, obviously, is what makes Derrida so interested in this book.

Socrates compares writing to a pharmakon, a drug, a poison: writing repeats without knowing, creates abominable simulacra. Here Socrates deliberately overlooks the other meaning of the word: the cure. Socrates suggests a different pharmakon, a medicine: dialectics, the philosophical form of dialogue. This, he claims, can lead us to the truth of the eidos, that which is identical to itself, always the same as itself, invariable. Here Socrates again overlooks the 'other' reading of the word 'pharmakon': the poison. He acts as a magician (pharmakos) - Socrates himself speaks about a supernatural voice that talks through him - and his most famous medicine (pharmakon) is speech, dialectics and dialogue leading to ultimate knowledge and truth.

But, ironically, Socrates also becomes Athens's most famous 'other' pharmakos, the scapegoat. He becomes a stranger, even an enemy who poisons the republic and its citizens. He is an abominable 'other'; not the absolute other, the barbarian, but the other (the outside) who is very near, like those outcasts, who is always-already on the inside. He is at once the 'cure' and the 'poison', and just like him, the Athenians chose to forget one of those meanings according to the need.

And, at the end, Plato put Socrates in what he considered to be the vilest of all poisons: in writing, that survives to this day. Phaedrus and Socrates both stand as a metonym [very significantly meaning "beyond names"] for the whole contest between speech and letters, for the central (if such an inappropriate word can be excused) theme of the Derridian project. The interplay between the words pharmakon-pharmakos-pharmakeus is another example of Derridian 'Trace'.

I'm not trying to steal, by any means, the spotlight of your post, les protagonistes, but I felt I had to make a comment on this post:

malachovsky, Western civilization has always glorified the hero, the sacrifice of life for the city, the state, the nation; it has rarely asked the question of whether the established city, state, nation were worth the sacrifice (I make a fine connection here with the second part of that post by "copain" quoting "pitchman" I was not addressing in my first post,

The taboo on the unquestionable prerogative of the whole has always been maintained and enforced, and it has been maintained and enforced the more brutally the more the whole was supposed to consist of free individuals.

The question is now being asked — asked from without — and it is taken up by those who refuse to play the game of the affluents — the question of whether the abolition of this whole is not the precondition for the emergence of a truly human city, state, nation.

I researched a bit where does all this TMT thing comes from - it looks like from existential philosophers like Sartre, Camus and the like. Now, I have not read Sartre/Camus - I simply came upon a piece quoted by one of your fellow posters on this board. Take a look at it and draw your own judgment, as to whether such a piece deserves being printed (in book form) or not - maybe it's just me, but I find it very odd to read about a guy who "feels his mouth full of his tongue" - I am sure he's missing something - and truth-be-told, in the "hood" where I live, he'd get that right advice off-prompt, if yanno what I mean!

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Existence is undoubtedly problematic and disturbing. In one weekend strip, in Sartre's "Peanuts," Schulz succinctly describes the horror of discovering one's own existence in the world:

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Linus: I'm aware of my tongue ... It's an awful feeling! Every now and then I become aware that I have a tongue inside my mouth, and then it starts to feel lumped up ... I can't help it ... I can't put it out of my mind ... I keep thinking about where my tongue would be if I weren't thinking about it, and then I can feel it sort of pressing against my teeth ...

Sartre devoted an entire book to this experience – his 1938 novel "Nausea" in which his character Roquentin is alarmed to discover his own actuality. But Linus sums the point up very well in a few frames.

malachovsky, I understand your approach and sense of practicality you're bringing here - but if you stay alone and do not socialize with other people - as it is the case with lonely people like philosophers - it's not surprising that similar thoughts will come to your mind.

Now, it's never occurred to me, but I am sure it has to other people - Sartre, being on the record, on this kind of thing.